Poster of the Month: Echoes of Odessa

The first thing I noticed about this 1970s East German poster for Battleship Potemkin wasn’t the design, but the paper itself. The surface feels slightly coarse, fibrous, almost matte in a way that Western posters of the same era rarely are. It carries a muted fragility, but it is clear that the material remembers the world from which it came — a command economy where paper was rationed, production was centralised, and artistic output had to negotiate its place within the limitations of the state.

In that sense, this poster transcends mere image into material culture.

Every wrinkle, fold line, and uneven cut is a trace of life in the DDR, where cultural goods were produced in environments shaped less by market forces and more by ideological purpose. American or French posters of the same period often boast glossy finishes, richer dyes, and cleaner mass production. This one speaks more softly: its palette restrained, its silhouettes stark, its texture almost industrial. Even the small red square—floating above the skyline like a signal flare—feels like a deliberate punctuation, a controlled burst of colour within an economy of scarcity.

The politics of reviving Potemkin in East Germany during the Cold War are not subtle. Eisenstein’s 1925 film, long canonised as a revolutionary masterpiece, found renewed life in the socialist bloc as both cultural inheritance and ideological reinforcement. To show Potemkin in the DDR was to affirm a lineage: workers’ struggle, solidarity, the righteousness of revolt. Yet what interests me now is not the message, but the medium. This modest sheet of paper — produced decades after the film’s debut — reveals as much about East German society as the film ever did. The poster becomes an archive, capturing not just cinema, but the conditions under which cinema was remembered.

Personally, this poster represents a shift in my collecting journey: a move from simply appreciating the artwork to understanding the worlds behind it. Potemkin may be about revolution, but it is the poster that reminds me how history survives — not only in grand narratives or iconic scenes, but in the quiet, physical textures of paper, ink, and state machinery.

The echoes of Odessa ring far beyond its steps.