Und neues Leben blüht aus den Ruinen (And new Life blossoms from the ruins)

Klaus Staeck is a talented photomontage artist with a knack for making his political and ecological messages immediately and efficiently clear. This particular poster, which takes its title from a passage in Friedrich Schiller’s 1804 play Wilhelm Tell, brings to mind Alan Weisman’s 2007 study, The World Without Us. Weisman describes the ability of nature to reclaim an urban area once it is abandoned by humanity. The case study presented by Weisman is the community of Varosha, a disputed area on the island of Cyprus which became a no-man’s land and remained unoccupied for many years. He tells the story of Varosha in part from the perspective of a newspaper columnist, Metin Münir, who was allowed a brief visit in Varosha in 1980, six years after its abandonment:

“Roofs had collapsed and trees were growing straight out of houses... What struck him most, though, wasn’t the absence of life but its vibrant presence. With the humans who built Varosha gone, nature was intently recouping it... The wrecking crews weren’t just trees, Münir marveled, but also flowers. Tiny seeds of wild Cyprus cyclamen had wedged into cracks, germinated, and heaved aside entire slabs of cement.”