Werner Tübke and the Americans, 1989.

Werner Tübke -- that's the guy.

Occasionally I'm possessed by weird flashbacks to my heavy travel years, past the oft-repeated drinking anecdotes to the dislodging of sheer, otherwise forgotten esoterica: Street food in Skopje, a "free" Bergen piano recital that wasn't, or the Irish woman's insistence that my voice reminded her of John Wayne's.

In the waning days of our stay in East Germany in 1989 -- unbeknownst to us, in the waning days of East Germany as a geopolitical concept -- my friend Jeff spotted some rather arresting artwork on an East Berlin sidewalk poster, and we explored the archway into a gallery of some sort where the art of Werner Tübke was on display. It wasn't the panorama of the German peasant's war for which the artist was best known. Memories are hazy, and beer quite well may have played a role. I just remember being impressed and wanting to buy the poster, of which none were on sale.

Nonetheless, somewhere in a stack of banker's boxes, there may be a physical remnant of this viewing. I saved much forensic evidence of my travels, from ticket stubs and meal receipts to bottle caps and cigar wrappers, imagining that examining the flotsam and jetsam would bolster my recall in the years to come. For this to be the case, I'd actually have to sift through it, but doing so might place an unwelcome spotlight on a quarter-century's time elapsed.

Like sleeping dogs, the prompters mostly are left to lie. It's better to rely on the accumulated weight of the experiences, and the way they changed me.

Take East German art seriously, by Bernhard Schulz (The Art Newspaper)

 ... Debate about East German art has suffered from misperceptions for many years. At the time of the country’s division, East German artists were often perceived as representatives of “their” government. This was confirmed by Documenta 6 in 1977, when works by the so-called Leipziger Viererbande (Leipzig gang of four)— Bernhard Heisig, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Willi Sitte and Werner Tübke—made their first appearance in the West and became, in the minds of curators and critics, representative of GDR art.