Das Riesenrad

In 1979 the Leipzig painter Wilfried Falkenthal completed a four-part painting in close collaboration with the workers of the Jürgen Heine Brigade of the August Bebel Mill in Helbra, a project commissioned by the Mansfeld Combine. Das Riesenrad [The Ferris Wheel] is a fancifully exaggerated portrait of both the men’s everyday working life and leisure time as well as of Mansfeld’s cultural landscape. Lew Hohmann’s documentary film of the same name was made for East German television. It documents the artist’s working process and the exchange between the artist and workers inside and outside of the workplace, including a visit they paid to his studio in Leipzig. What do the workers, who were supposed to help the artist “permeate the work with the requisite realism, socialist realism”, think of the artist’s portrayal? Over images of the presentation of the commissioned work at an exhibition, Hohmann inserts a sound collage of the guests’ controversial opinions. Falkenthal’s subtle irony, as expressed in the painting’s central motif – a Ferris wheel cabin in which the cheery brigade members and their female companions soar through a blue sky over the spoil tips – is even more clear in light of another cultural product of the Mansfeld Combine created a year earlier: the cover of the album Aus dem Schacht den Sternen ein Stück näher [From the shaft a bit closer to the stars], which features a photo of Yuri Gagarin’s capsule (in which he became the first human being to circle the earth from outer space) against a blue background.