The party was supposed to last forever. This is the faith that pulses through Christian Stemmler’s photobook, “ANFANG/BEGINNING: BERLIN 1994–99.” It is an intimate archive of a subcultural moment that defined a city, but it is also something more personal: a recovered heartbeat.

At seventeen, Stemmler left home for a squat in East Berlin. He found work in clubs and picked up an analog camera. There was no thought of a career, only a need to hold onto the fleeting intensity, tenderness, and chaos. His portraits and snapshots (of friends, DJs, and artists on public transport or against a simple bedsheet) capture a generation living as if the night would never end.

Then, the world changed. When digital technology took over, Stemmler stepped away from photography. He built a career in fashion styling, keeping his analog images hidden, convinced they had no place in a new, professionalized world.

The act of creating this book became an excavation. He spent nine months scanning nearly 300 films, reliving that formative era frame by frame. This process was a catharsis. And in revisiting the past, a future clicked back into place. He picked up his camera again. “It felt like the beginning of a new life,” he says.

The Berlin he documented is gone. It was anarchic and limitless, a city of squats and clubs fueled by a boundless imagination. He recalls a community where groups of twenty or thirty friends looked out for one another. They were warned the city was being sold, but no one believed it. How could so much space, so much freedom, ever be filled?

Anfang means beginning. The title is a promise to the past and a contract with the future. The party did end. But for Stemmler, the work of seeing has just started again. The book is his love letter to a lost city, and his own artistic rebirth.

All images by Christian Stemmler