Jan Caspers, Anne König & Jan Wenzel

“EINIGKEIT UND RECHT UND FLATRATE: DAS FERNMELDEWESEN“, 2010
Silhouette frieze

In November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. A few days later a licence was issued to the Mannesmann company to construct a digital cellular radio network. The synchronicity of the events is coincidental but it does throw up the question: what is retained as ‘history’ in one’s mind? In Einigkeit und Recht und Flatrate: Das Fernmeldewesen [Unity and Law, and Flatrate: Telecommunications], a paper-cut silhouette frieze some meters long, Jan Caspars, Anne König and Jan Wenzel present an abundance of individual depictions of the transfor- mation of telecommunications and the farreaching reorganization of social communication that accompanied it. Here, everyday events, developments in technology, and the history of infrastructures interpenetrate. A pictorial history about the end of the state monopoly of the post and the triumph of neoliberalism.