Jana Müller’s new artists’ book, Falscher Hase/Mock Rabbit, opens by shedding light on criminal investigations in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), offering an artistic exploration of historical narratives and personal reflections and a contemporary journey to crime scenes on both sides of the world. Making use of her extensive online archive at http://falscherhase. jana-mueller.de, Müller delves into artistic discussions surrounding crime.

At the core of the research is Müller’s 86-year-old father, a former police detective with first-hand experience in murder cases and espionage within socialist Germany. Despite the official denial of crime in the GDR, Müller’s father shares insights from his past.

Falscher Hase/Mock Rabbit places conversations between the artist and her father - accompanied by photographic documentation and textual fragments from Müller’s childhood memories - alongside historical documents sourced from various archives. The visual narrative unfolds through a selection of images, ranging from archival evidence and familial artifacts to crime scene photographs. Photo theorist Mira Anneli Naß contributes an analysis, examining parallels in media representations of crimes throughout the history of the two German states, compared with Müller’s photo-forensic-artistic approach. Taking reference from the stacked files within which Müller conducted her research, the book’s format makes use of papers of varying colours and sizes to reflect different categories of text.

Text in English and German.