An Artist Talks with Salomea Genin, 25.o8.2011, Kunsthaus Tacheles, Berlin.

Salomea Genin was born in 1932 in Berlin to Polish-Jewish parents and fled the Nazis with her family to Australia in 1939. In 1944 she joined the Eureka Youth (Young Communist) League and in 1949 - the beginning of the Cold War - the Australian Communist Party. In 1951, as a delegate to the World Youth Festival in East Berlin, she became convinced her calling was to help build an anti-fascist state in the newly-founded German Democratic Republic (East Germany).

In 1963, after a nine-year struggle to immigrate, she finally settled there. Twenty years later, she realized that she was living in a police state, one in which she had willingly participated. By 1985, psychotherapy and writing a book about her family enabled her to find the strength to go into political opposition and build a new life, even before the Berlin Wall and East Germany itself were dismantled in 1989. ( from www.salomeagenin.de)

I was very happy to great Salomea Genin, "a Jewish woman of the world", as she calls herself. She is a woman with an incredible life experience. She shared with us in two hours, some of her memories and even gave us the priviledge of a few Communist songs, that she interpreted with emotion. I must confess, I cried.

She has grown from her experience and shares. She brought us wisdom. She is fortunate to have thought over her past and transformed her suffering into generosity and talent. She is currently writing a fourth book.

She has perspective and insight over human behaviour and political regimes. She actually found herself comparing the nazis to the stasis, and discovered how they ressembled each other. She found out how people get trapped inside ideas and obediance towards hierarchy, leading to horror and blindness.

She has also forgiven... And she has forgiven herself. Salomea has found peace inside her heart. She says "I realized that the only way to bring peace around you, is to find peace inside yourself ".

She discovered again the Tacheles, and told us she came when she was 18 to a club downstairs in the twenties. There was a big cinema inside the theater. She was excited to visit it again. She saw that the Tacheles was still alive and that artists work here after all these years.

For those who do not know Tacheles means "speak the truth " and that is precisely what Salomea Genin does. It was a very moving talk.

video coming shortly

www.salomeagenin.de