The Gamsenteich Duck Republic - Book

Edited by Bertram Haude, Jens Volz, Claudia Siegel
Design: Claudia Siegel,
Photographs double pages: Jens Volz
Authors: Bertram Haude and Jens Volz as well as Barbara Könczöl, Katrin Franke, Dr. Benno Zabel, Dr. Daniel Schmidt, Dr. Friedrich Kühn, Ingo Jonas, Stefan Kausch. Special thanks to Tobias Grave and Daniel Hechler for their collaboration on the book.

Institut für Buchkunst Leipzig, 2004
128 pages / hardcover / 25 color illustrations

The book project was awarded the Ars Lipsiensis art prize by Dresdner Bank and was voted one of the most beautiful books in Germany in 2006.

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How much participation in events and how much involvement in the constitutive ideas of a community are necessary to keep it alive? The book hopes to keep this question open in its own way. The aim is to address that concept of society in which we still find ourselves as a matter of course.

The book consists of two parts
1. a research report on the social organization of mallards and
2. a collection of scientific texts dealing with democracy and community.

The research report on the coexistence of ducks was written by the two artists Bertram Haude and Jens Volz. In 2003, they set off on an excursion to Neustadt an der Orla, a small town in Thuringia, and discovered a strange community there: The Gamsenteich Duck Republic. Haude and Volz investigated the structure of this duck society. Their knowledge and findings are published for the first time in this book.

The two parts of the book are linked by a fold-out picture panel, an illustration of the pond. This middle section is the connecting element and table of contents. From here, the reader is led to the texts in Part 2 of the book. In addition, the middle section contains a glossary by Dr. Daniel Schmidt, which explains basic political science terms with idiosyncratic definitions. The texts in the second part were written by academics who, based on the phenomenon of the duck republic, present reflections on democracy and community. They try to find out what actually constitutes a form of government that calls itself democratic, what its limits are and what myths are inherent in it. Between these texts are double-page color photographs. These pictures tie in with the Duck Republic and aim to show once again the strange connection between the duck and human worlds.