Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 30, Issue 2, pp 156–170, ISSN 0193-5615, electronic ISSN 1548-1409.
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Expressions of Experience and Experiences of
Expression: Museum Re-Presentations of
GDR History
DAPHNE BERDAHL
Department of Anthropology
University of Minnesota
215 Ford Hall
Minneapolis, MN 55455
SUMMARY This article interrogates the production of historical memory in the
former GDR. It addresses the politics of memory and museum representations in terms
of the ongoing complex and often contradictory struggles over the production of knowledge
about the East German past, the contexts of this production, and the ways in
which the struggles themselves shed light upon larger social and political processes
within reunified Germany more generally. I am concerned with the politics of memorymaking
and the various domains in which memory is constructed and deployed. I also
consider the cultural implications and effects of such memory-making practices.
[Keywords: memory, identity, museums, representation, Germany]
Introduction
In the heart of Leipzig’s downtown, on the main street of the city’s
pedestrian zone, stands a statue called “The Step of the Century.” Completed
in the mid-1980s by the renowned East German artist Wolfgang Mattheuer and
erected here at this location in 1999, the larger-than-life figure’s right hand is
extended in the Nazi salute while its left hand is clenched in a worker’s fist; it
steps forward, half dressed and half in military uniform, with its head hidden
and barely visible, into an unknown future (Figure 1). Like many works of art,
the statue has been subject to a range of interpretations. Mattheuer has
described it as relating to his interest in “the significant tension between conformity
and protest, between yes and no, which stimulates and sharpens our
vision of the future”; others have read it as an “allegory of totalitarianism” or
a “thought-image [Denkbild] for the eternal conflict between good and evil.”1 In
the GDR, the sculpture was awarded a national prize for depicting the “clash
during this century between fascism/Nazism on the one side and
Leninism/Stalinism on the other.”2 Yet the statue’s placement in front of the
Leipzig Forum of Contemporary History (Zeitgeschichtliches Forum Leipzig) in
honor of the museum’s opening in 1999 has invested it with yet another meaning—now
the dominant interpretation—reflecting the museum’s mission of
portraying the “history of resistance and opposition in the GDR” and its underlying
agenda of “comparative dictatorship studies.” According to the museum
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Berdahl Expressions of Experience and Experiences of Expression 157
director, the statue (one of his exhibit favorites) “demonstrates the German
people’s step away from two dictatorships.”3 Indeed, this or a similar explanation
is frequently part of museum tours as well as Leipzig city tours. In its new
context within the cultural landscape of reunited Germany, then, the “Step of
the Century” is read as symbolizing the new Germany’s step out of the last
century, leaving behind its troubled pasts of Nazism and socialism. I begin
with this image, for it illuminates and contextualizes several issues surrounding
the politics of memory and museum representations that I address in this
article: the ongoing complex and often contradictory struggles over the
production of knowledge about the East German past, the contexts of this production,
and the ways in which the struggles themselves shed light upon larger
social and political processes within reunified Germany more generally.
The question of the relationship to and representation of the GDR past
gained immediate relevance after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and has been
the subject of significant popular as well as scholarly discussion and debate ever
since.4 I am interested here not just in the politics of memory-making, but also
in the various domains in which memory is constructed and deployed, and in
the cultural implications and effects of such memory-making practices. My aim
here, then, is to interrogate the production of historical memory in the former
GDR, and I do so by comparing two cases of the “museumification” of GDR
Figure 1.
The statue called “The Step of the Century,” completed in the mid-1980s by
the renowned East German artist Wolfgang Mattheuer.
07.AHU.30_156-170.qxd 21/10/2005 6:26 Page 157
history: the state-sponsored and officially sanctioned Forum of Contemporary
History in Leipzig, and a local association’s collection and exhibition of GDR
material culture.
My discussion is indebted to a large and burgeoning scholarship on
museums, a field in which Edward Bruner has been an exemplary pioneer
(Bruner 1993, 1994, 2005). Much of this work has viewed museums as critical
sites for the convergence of social, cultural, and political forces: as arenas for
the production of national identity, national citizens, and national “culture”
(Dodd 1986; Duncan 1995); as objects of the tourist gaze (Urry 1990); as part of
new disciplines of power (Bennett 1995); as spaces of cultural representation
and contestation (Bruner 1993; Gable and Handler 1997; Karp and Lavine 1991;
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998; Stocking 1985). Yet as anthropologists Eric Gable
and Richard Handler (1997) have pointed out, “most research on museums has
proceeded by ignoring much of what happens in them.” Stressing the advantages
of an ethnographic approach to museum studies, Bruner has similarly
argued, “This privileging of the specific leads to a consideration of the complexity
of forces and multiplicity of voices and meanings at work. Audiences
are not passive recipients of received wisdom and official views; the challenge
is to understand the interpretations of the audience in particular instances”
(Bruner 2005:128).
Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2001 in the
city of Leipzig, this article explores discourses and practices surrounding two
radically different representations of GDR history. Both contrasting cases,
I argue, reflect ongoing contestations over the meanings of the GDR past as
well as the significant power imbalances in which such struggles occur.
Repression and Resistance: The Zeitgeschichtliches Forum Leipzig (ZGF)
The Leipzig Forum of Contemporary History (ZGF) is the sole satellite
branch of the House of History (Haus der Geschichte) in Bonn, a project initiated
by Helmut Kohl in 1982 with a conservative and hence controversial agenda
that culminated in the opening of the museum in Bonn eight years later.5 The
ZGF is commonly described as the eastern counterpart to the Bonn original. It
was opened with great fanfare in a ceremony attended by Chancellor Schroeder
on October 9, 1999, the tenth anniversary of what is widely believed to be the
“turning point” in the peaceful demonstrations of 1989 in Leipzig.6 The city was
selected as the site for the museum because of its role in this history.
As an institution, the ZGF describes itself as a “place of living remembrance.”
It thus strives to be more than a museum; it is also a memorial and a gathering
place for lectures, discussions, and conferences. Indeed, the institution makes
a very valuable contribution in this sense to intellectual life and historical work
in Leipzig and beyond. Because the explicit focus of the museum is on “the
history of resistance and opposition during the dictatorship of the Soviet occupation
zone and the GDR,” it commemorates a critical element of the East
German experience as well as the earth-shattering events of 1989. Underlying
this focus on repression and resistance is a scholarly interest in and commitment
to what is sometimes called “comparative dictatorship studies”—a belief
in the historical comparability of the Nazi and socialist regimes, with the latter
described in the exhibit catalogue as the “second German dictatorship.”7
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These ideological underpinnings are evident throughout the chronologically
organized exhibit, where stories and images of suffering, repression, and state
violence are foregrounded alongside a narrative of resistance and opposition.
Guided tours—frequently given by university students too young to have
many memories of the GDR—often privilege the most gruesome or sensational
installations, highlighting for visitors a sequential horror of socialist abuses. In
addition to key events in political and economic history, exhibits contain several
installations on political prisoners as well as the fortification of the interGerman
border in the 1950s and the building of the Berlin Wall. An entire
room, complete with a wall of video footage and a Soviet “division canon,” is
dedicated to the uprising on June 17, 1953, while another section focuses on
the biographies of political dissidents and the work of oppositional peace
and environmental groups. Displays representing GDR consumer culture and
material scarcity are sandwiched between depictions of successful escapes and
an exhibit devoted to the Stasi (State Security Police) that includes cases of files,
surveillance equipment, and paraphernalia (containing, among other items,
several odor specimens of regime opponents in canning jars8 as well as actual
Stasi surveillance videos; there also is a van with a restructured interior to
accommodate political prisoners without being recognizable as such on the
outside). The narrative culminates in a triumphalist portrayal of 1989, the
largest exhibit area in the museum, containing protest demonstration banners,
a section of the Berlin Wall, the iconic Trabant car, and other artifacts of that
eventful period. The last area of exhibit focuses on post-Wall eastern Germany,
with displays on building booms, unemployment, and violence against foreigners
that call specific attention to contemporary social issues and economic
concerns but also risk naturalizing them in the larger context of the museums’
teleological narrative.
Like many contemporary museums, the ZGF exhibits draw upon multiple
media to invite active visitor participation and engagement. Audio stations,
touch screens, video monitors, and interactive hands-on displays abound as
part of the Haus der Geschichte’s larger objective of enabling visitors to
“experience history.” This play with the senses surrounds visitors with images
and sounds that can operate on many levels, sometimes eliciting emotional,
even visceral reactions. Upon entering the exhibit area on the Berlin Wall, for
example, one is confronted with videos of attempted escapes, with people
screaming, hanging out of windows, or being mangled by barbed wire. The
reverberations of tank rumblings and screeching provides the audio background
for the June 17 uprising. With the exception of dissident songwriter
Wolf Biermann’s music, in fact, one’s auditory experience of the museum is
dominated by the sounds of bullets being fired, churches being blown up, and
human cries. Taken together, these acoustic enhancements are carefully
selected to conform to the museum’s emphasis on repression and resistance, a
narrative described by museum directors and employees as “the Concept.”9
This narrative Concept is stressed repeatedly in the rigorous screening of
museum guides. “You must agree with and stand by our Concept,” one university
student was reportedly told firmly during her second round of interviews
for a tour guide position. She was not offered the job after expressing
reservations about her ability and willingness to comply with the strict guidelines.
Indeed, the narrative of repression and resistance not only dominates the
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museum Concept, but it can also be internalized and reproduced in personal
accounts during guided tours. I was told, for example, of a visit to the museum
by a group of local historians interested in initiating a conversation about representational
practices at the exhibit. “Throughout the tour our guide grew
increasingly excited and extreme,” one of them recalled, “and when we came
to the [Stasi van], she claimed that she had sat as a prisoner inside. I thought to
myself: ‘Wow! That is really awful.’ But then a member of our group exclaimed,
‘No, Angelika, you sat in the communist party’s (SED) district management
office!’ She turned bright red and just left.”
Pressure to adhere to the museum Concept is reportedly felt very strongly
by museum employees, allegedly creating an occasional atmosphere of fear
and suspicion in the workplace. Most museum employees only wanted to
speak off the record, for example. I was especially alarmed to hear about
rumors of wiretapping employee phone conversations.
Rumors and suspicion aside, it seems to me that a more vexing issue is at
stake here. While the museum’s literature and staff are careful to point out that
the focal point of the museum is “dictatorship and resistance” rather than “the
history of the GDR,” as the sole branch of the Haus der Geschichte national
museum in the East (the “little brother” of the Haus der Geschichte in Bonn—
a description that invoked the diminutive term used in referring to “brothers
and sisters in the East”) and the only federally organized and funded museum
dedicated exclusively to the GDR, the effect of this emphasis is to re-present
GDR history in these terms. Media accounts of the museum’s opening heralded
it as an “exhibit and information center” that provides “a broad
overview of the GDR and the division of Germany.”10 More specifically, the
museum was applauded at its opening for its contribution to “the history of
democracy in Germany”11 and for demonstrating the “civil courage” of eastern
Germans during the fall of 1989, an “unparalleled enrichment of German
history.”12 In his speech at the opening ceremony, Chancellor Schröder asked
“not to be misunderstood” when he said that one could be “pleased to be a
German today . . . to be proud of the realization of democracy.”13
This adamant, indeed dogmatic, privileging of resistance at the museum has
as its subtext, it seems to me, the haunted past of the “first German dictatorship”
and the question of German guilt. Conceptually and discursively linking
the two regimes through the rhetoric of “a second German dictatorship”
(a discourse in which comparability may be equated with commensurability,
even if that is not its intended effect), the director of the Leipzig Forum writes
in the exhibit catalogue:
We have placed special emphasis on biographical approaches; it was however, clear
that the isolated examples of bravery under the dictatorship stand for the courage of
hundreds of thousands of other resisting East Germans. [Eckert 2001]
The privileged narrative here, then, is ultimately one of redemption: a new
official history for the new Germany. The national director of the Haus der
Geschichte, Hermann Schäfer, gestured toward this nationalizing project in
describing the mission of the Leipzig ZGF:
We want to break what the opinion research institutes have diagnosed as the wall
of silence between east and west—break it by means of exhibitions, events and
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publications produced and sponsored by the new museum in Leipzig, in order to
find a historical conception common to all Germans.14
Despite favorable ratings in museum visitor surveys (highly touted in the
exhibit catalogue15), local reactions do not reveal that efforts to forge this “common
historical conception” have been successful. In informal conversations as
well as during interviews on other subjects, I often heard the ZGF described as
a “victor’s history.” “It is purely propaganda from the western side,” a man in
his forties working for the Chamber of Commerce angrily explained. “It disgusts
me just when I see the themes portrayed there: ‘church in socialism,’
‘resistance,’ ‘opposition.’ All of this is a very western perspective.” Outside the
workplace, one of the most historically sophisticated of the ZGF tour guides
agreed: “The museum conveys to visitors the impression that this is the history
of the GDR, but it isn’t. It is designed with a western view of GDR history.
Many visitors from the East cannot find themselves here.” An East German historian
similarly suggested: “Actually I think it is kind of cute. . . . People in the
GDR learned how to read things critically. I hope they apply those skills to this
exhibit.”
Another common local reaction—uttered in rage by some while exiting the
exhibit area16 and by others as a simple fact in subsequent conversations
outside the museum—is: “That is not how I experienced the GDR!” “Sure there
were people who were imprisoned or who were spied upon,” one local merchant
told me, “but that was not my experience. I’m sorry, but that was just not
my experience.” When I asked an artist in her late thirties about the emphasis
on dictatorship and resistance exemplified by the Stasi van and border shootings,
she answered:
[In GDR times] you spent your days looking for the one detergent that was hard to
get that didn’t give your kids a rash. And then because you wanted your little ones
to have some vitamins, you bought carrots, cleaned them, pressed them together
with some apples, because that was how you could get juice. And when there was
juice in the store, you took a box to the store and stood in line so that you could go
for a while without having to press your own [juice]. That was daily life in the GDR.
The social and political context for these reactions is a much more general
devaluation of East German histories since reunification. As I have written
about elsewhere (Berdahl 1999), such practices have included the selling of
East German factories to western companies (occasionally for next to nothing);
the discrediting of the GDR educational system, particularly the Abwicklung17
(restructuring) of the universities; the renaming of schools, streets, and other
public buildings; the trial of Berlin border guards that for many East Germans
represented a different sort of victors’ justice; debates over what to do with and
about East Germany’s Stasi heritage that have often compared the GDR to the
Third Reich; and discourses that ridiculed the backwardness of East German
industry and consumer goods while ignoring the political and economic
contexts that may have produced it. Although generated and experienced differently
in form and content, such practices have generally been grouped
together in eastern German discourses of oppositional solidarity against western
hegemony—of which the ZGF has come to be viewed by many as an
emblem.
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Bearing Witness: The Ostalgie Project
Since the mid-1990s a range of institutional and individual practices have
emerged as part of a counter-narrative to such hegemonic memory-making
and devaluations of the GDR. Commonly referred to as “Ostalgie” (nostalgia
for the East), the production of counter-memories and identities has taken
many forms: self-described “nostalgia cafes” that are decorated with artifacts
from the socialist period and serve “traditional” GDR fare; dance parties
(“Ostivals” or “Ostalgie Nights”) featuring East German rock music and, occasionally,
a double of Erich Honecker; numerous publications and trivia games
recalling life in the GDR; supermarkets, mail-order Web sites, and an annual
“OstPro” trade show fair that specialize in East German products. The 1999
release and box-office success of two “Ostalgie films” (Sonnenallee and Helden
Wie Wir) marked the emergence of Ostalgie as a truly mass cultural phenomenon.
More recently, the critically acclaimed and top-grossing 2002 film,
“Goodbye Lenin,” unleashed a new wave of Ostalgie, including a flurry of
“Ostshows,” featuring curiosities of life in the GDR, on at least five major
German television networks.
What I want to focus on here, however, is a specific example of a counternarrative
to the official histories and memories represented by the ZGF, a
collection of East German “everyday objects” by a local nonprofit organization.
The collection reflects the privileging of material culture in eastern German
historical memory (Betts 2000), the most extensive and sophisticated example
of which is the Museum for East German Everyday Life Culture in
Eisenhüttenstadt, a truly professional undertaking; its mission entails the
“museumification of the world of GDR objects as an active and mutual communication
that allows for reflective thought in a period of individual and
often painful reorientation” (Ludwig 1996; Ludwig and Kuhn 1997a, 1997b).
The “Zeitzeugen Ostalgie” project (Ostalgie Witnesses to History), however, is
representative of more widespread practices of collecting, cataloging, and
displaying “GDR everyday life.” Voluntary associations dedicated to the documentation
and preservation of “GDR everyday life,” for example, allocate
responsibilities among members for collecting everything—from East German
packaging materials to work brigade medals. Numerous makeshift museums,
galleries, and displays in community centers or people’s homes similarly
contain various objects of the vanished state.18
The “Zeitzeugen Ostalgie” collection is the product of governmentsubsidized
make-work jobs (Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahmen, or ABM); the
purpose of the organization of which it is a part (whose name is “Neue Arbeit—
Wurzen”) is to generate jobs in the “second labor market,” a term referring to
the government-subsidized domain of employment. People employed as ABM
do not consider themselves to be working in a “real job,” as the man who picked
me up from the train station explained immediately after introducing himself:
“I am working in the second labor market,” he said. “In capitalism there is a first
labor market, but somehow there is still also a second one.” As Angela Jancius
has pointed out in her intriguing study of unemployment in the former GDR,
workers employed in the second labor market perceive themselves as engaged
in “useful but not productive labor” (Jancius 2002).
By any measure, the work of the three ABM staff employed at the
“Zeitzeugen Ostalgie” project has been a labor of love. With no experience or
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training in exhibition design, they have painstakingly assembled a collection of
GDR artifacts from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s ranging from food packaging to
electronics to household furniture. In former classrooms of a vacated school
building, the exhibit is comprised of reconstructed domestic living spaces as
well as thematic clusters of particular items. A living room features a typical
GDR upholstered sofa, side chairs on silver casters, coffee table, and wall unit
displaying characteristic decorative objects (Figure 2); a kitchen is full of
aluminum cooking pans and utensils, plastic kitchen gadgets and dinnerware,
obsolescent appliances, and East German foodstuffs. The display items elicit
what the exhibit organizers describe as an “Aha effect,” a reaction that connects
personal biographies to collective memory as visitors recognize and tell stories
about familiar but forgotten cultural objects. These East German things are particularly
effective lieux de memoir for what Paul Betts has insightfully termed
their “aesthetics of sameness. . . . That is, the very lack of product innovation
and repackaging assured that these objects—however privately experienced
and remembered—would function as transgenerational markers of East
German culture and identity” (Betts 2000). A warehouse of discarded used furniture
for low-income families, the vast majority of which are GDR products,
occupies an adjacent room; a separate ABM project of the Neue Arbeit Wurzen,
these items represent for many not only the throwaway mentality of today’s
consumer society but also the dustbin of history to which the GDR and its
products have been relegated, and from which the relics of Ostalgie have been
culled.
The idea for the project came to one of the organization directors one day
upon hearing what schoolchildren were learning about the GDR in class.
Berdahl Expressions of Experience and Experiences of Expression 163
Figure 2.
ABM staff working on the “Zeitzeugen Ostalgie” project have created an
exhibit comprised of reconstructed domestic living spaces as well as thematic
clusters of particular items. Here a living room features a typical GDR
upholstered sofa, side chairs on silver casters, coffee table, and wall unit
displaying characteristic decorative objects.
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I was interested in what the kids were learning about the GDR then, in the year 1997
or 1998. [My young relative] told me that there was nothing to eat, that people
couldn’t buy anything. Everything was dark and grey. . . . And people weren’t
allowed to laugh and weren’t able to laugh. . . . And I thought to myself, this can’t be
true. So we brainstormed about how to turn this into an ABM project. . . . what was
daily life really like?
As we walked through the exhibit, my hosts repeatedly stressed that they
did not want to “glorify the GDR,” that this was intended as a completely
“apolitical exhibit.” As evidence of this, they cited their “strategic decision” not
to include political memorabilia like pins, medals, uniforms, or FDJ scarves. In
the kitchen area they described showing schoolchildren how juice was pressed,
how fruits and vegetables were preserved “because you couldn’t just go to the
store and buy everything.” The quaintness of socialist design was particularly
highlighted in the electronics room, featuring, among other things, a square
phonograph record (Figure 3). “We chose the name ‘historical witnesses,’” one
of the directors explained when I asked about the project title, “because we
didn’t want to write simply ‘objects of utility’ [Gebrauchsgegenstände] but also
because these [things] really are witnesses.”
But to what, we may ask, do these objects bear witness? Part of the answer
to this question may lie in the comments and impressions of visitors left behind
in the guestbook, which overwhelmingly revealed that the exhibit was far from
“apolitical.” Some examples:
One can appreciate the meticulous effort and thoughtfulness that went into this
[exhibit], but the strong ideological one-sidedness is very disturbing.
Very nice . . . it recalls memories, above all how the prices remained stable for years.
164 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 30, Number 2
Figure 3.
The “Zeitzeugen Ostalgie” project exhibits the quaintness of socialist
design, particularly highlighted in the electronics room, featuring, among
other things, a square phonograph record.
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Remember this? We used to cook with it. And this we used to wash with. The
shampoo wasn’t bad either . . . but it was only available under the table.
Because this is also a part of my life, I was very happy to see this exhibit.
Many thanks for taking on the important task of collecting and preserving things
from a distant epoch. One shouldn’t think of this in terms of Ostalgie, but as a piece
of identity preserved.
What emerges in these comments—as in many other practices of Ostalgie—is
a sense of a highly complicated relationship between personal histories, disadvantage,
dispossession, the betrayal of promises, and the social worlds of
production and consumption. As I have argued elsewhere about Ostalgie more
generally (Berdahl 1999), such practices must be seen in the context of feelings
of profound displacement and disillusionment following reunification,
reflected in the popular saying that we have “emigrated without leaving
home.” As one university student said to me in a conversation about the
subject in the spring of 2001:
Everything simply disappeared. When you leave your past behind, you can
normally go home again, look at it—at your Heimat and so forth. But in this case
everything just disappeared.
The focus on East German things may also recall an identity as producers
that has been lost in this transition. In a society where productive labor was a
key aspect of state ideology and where the workplace was a central site for
social life, the high incidence of unemployment throughout eastern Germany
today has undermined profoundly many individuals’ sense of self and identity.
It is no accident, then, that a collection emphasizing the products of East
German labor emerged in the context of the “second labor market,” where feelings
of disillusionment, devalued selves, and betrayal often prevail. It seems to
me that there is something strikingly poignant in this self-validating effort
to recall and preserve a distinctive and honorable past, in this work created
for and performed by those considered “unemployable” in the “first labor
market.” One of the project participants told me:
I was born in 1961. Those whole years I was a child, youth, adult—school, studies,
work. It is a part of my life. The predominant part of my life. This Ostalgie is for me
also a piece of my own life, my own identity. . . . Those were formative years, that’s
how I would see it.
The frequent reference to GDR consumer culture in the guestbook
comments as well as in the exhibit tour and demonstration is also significant.
The fact that East German things have become mnemonics must be viewed in
relation to larger historical and political processes and contexts. The dominant
narrative in the Ostalgie collection is not one of a repressive dictatorship, as at
the ZGF, but of a regime that, quite literally, failed to deliver the goods. In this
sense, the emphasis on quaint East German things and their scarcity under
socialist rule—in explicit or implicit contrast to the plentiful supply of ever
new and improved products in the West—affirms and perpetuates a narrative
of “democratization” and national legitimacy in which access to consumer
goods and consumer choice are defined as fundamental rights and democratic
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expressions of individualism. Indeed, many observers have since suggested
that the transitions of 1989 were not about demands for political or human
rights, but for consumer rights.19 As the historian Ina Merkel has observed:
“The struggle between the systems did not take the form of armed conflict, but
was rather shifted to the marketplace. And it was here, in the sphere of consumerism,
that the battle was won” (Merkel 1998). In the context of this postwar
relationship between political legitimacy and mass consumption, such
re-presentations of the GDR not only contribute to the production of new
(counter-) memories and histories; they contribute to the production of citizenconsumers
as well (see Berdahl 2005).
Conclusion: Fashioning the Past
To conclude, I turn to an event in which these various domains and practices
of memory converged: a fashion show of East German clothing styles held at
the Leipzig Forum of Contemporary History during the Leipzig “museum
night,” an evening for promoting city museums with special presentations,
exhibits, and long opening hours. The master of ceremonies was an extremely
animated local celebrity (and former SED Party member), Paul Fröhlich, whose
energetic performance enlivened the packed house of onlookers. “Good
evening, Ladies and Gentleman,” he began. “Welcome to the Zeitgeschlichtes
Forum! . . . We would like to transport you this evening to the fashion and
Zeitgeist of the GDR.” While GDR tunes blasted over loudspeakers and period
photos were projected onto a nearby screen, models strode down the runway
outfitted in exemplary GDR fashion design (Figure 4). The running commentary
of the host had the audience laughing and applauding at nearly every
example, as Fröhlich drew upon a culturally shared knowledge of socialist
products, cultural images, and party rhetoric. Full of irony, he brilliantly
played with the history of socialist industrial design (“Here we have a multifunctional
downhill and cross-country ski”), often explicitly fetishizing the
objects on display: “Please look, with an eye for detail, at these buttons. Look
at these, as one says today, ‘cool’20 buttons. These are simply erotic details from
GDR designer times!” In another instance, he had the audience in stitches with
a demonstration of the sexual eroticism of a GDR vacuum cleaner. (Hint: the
vacuum cleaner bag inflates upright.)
The repeated references to GDR consumer culture required a shared and
privileged knowledge that excluded any audience member who had not experienced
socialism, creating a strong sense of solidarity among those “in the
know.” It would be easy, therefore, to categorize this performance as another
instance or commodification of “Ostalgie.” More than this, however, the show
was also a playful appropriation and ironic parody of Ostalgie. In this context,
East German things became “camp” rather than objects of nostalgic longing or
counter-memory. Thus, although one of the ZGF historians described the show
as not fitting into the Concept, suggesting to me that its presentation was a subversive
act because it was an attempt by several staff members to address critiques
of the ZGF by bringing in the “everyday” and because the museum
director did not approve of the idea, in fact the mocking tone and the focus on
the quaint, hopelessly backward and outdated GDR styles were quite in line
with the institutional agenda of creating a “historical conception common to all
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Germans.” Although it did not stress the museum’s focal point of dictatorship
and resistance, the show not only underscored the relationship between
national legitimacy and mass consumption, it also belittled and dismissed
eastern German critiques of hegemonic memory-making contained in many
Ostalgic practices. Indeed, poking fun at Ostalgie is fast becoming almost as
profitable a cottage industry as Ostalgie itself. Lyrics to a 2001 Leipzig cabaret
song, for example, reflect this satirizing sentiment:
Good federal republic citizens the Ossis want to be
Yet they buy only eastern products on their department-store shopping sprees
Spee and Florena, Rotkäppchen and Fit21
How long will the Office for Constitutional Protections
put up with it?22
The parodies of Ostalgie contained in the fashion show and cabaret song
signal one of the latest waves in the ongoing negotiation of memory in the former
GDR. Indeed, together with the two cases of “museumification” I have discussed
here, they reflect the multiple, fluid, shifting, complex, and often contradictory
forms and domains of memory production—and consumption—in post-socialist
eastern Germany. When viewed in this way, the work and the politics of
Berdahl Expressions of Experience and Experiences of Expression 167
Figure 4.
A fashion show of East German clothing styles held at the Leipzig Forum of
Contemporary History during the Leipzig “museum night.” Models on the
runway are outfitted “in exemplary GDR fashion design.”
07.AHU.30_156-170.qxd 21/10/2005 6:27 Page 167
memory and museums can be a window onto larger political processes and
landscapes of nation-building, identity formation, and belonging in a period of
social change and discord.
Notes
Acknowledgments. Funding for this research was provided by a Fulbright grant and a
University of Minnesota McKnight Land-Grant Professorship. This article is a revised
version of a paper that was presented at the University of Michigan-Dearborn in March
2002 and at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in April 2004. I thank the audiences
at these lectures for their valuable questions and comments. Above all, I thank
Ed Bruner for introducing me to anthropology and encouraging me to make it my
profession.
1. BerlineOnline: Romantiker im Jahrhundertschritt: Der Maler und Grafiker
Wolfgang Mattheuer wird heute 70. Ͻhttp://www.berlinonline.de/…ner_zeitung/
archiv/1997/kultur/0002/Ͼ
2. Ͻhttp://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/biograpfien/MattheuerWolfgangϾ
3. In Express Online, see Ͻwysiwyg://235/http:www.express.de/bonn/museen/
1392214.htmlϾ
4. See, e.g., Berdahl 1997; Betts 2000; Hermand and Silberman 2000; Ten Dyke 2001.
5. For a sophisticated discussion of the Bonn museum origins in the context of wider
debates about the politics of German history and memory, see Maier 1988.
6. Leipzig, known as the “city of heroes,” was where the Monday demonstrations of
1989 began. On October 9, over 70,000 citizens of the city took to the streets despite
warnings of orders to police to shoot; the absence of violence on this date signaled that
the demonstrations against the state could proceed peacefully, and participant demands
and numbers grew after that.
7. Hanna Schissler (2001) has pointed to the dangers of perpetuating cold war
narratives through such comparisons.
8. One of the many elaborate surveillance practices of the Stasi involved the
collection of scent specimens of regime opponents in preserving jars for use with scent
detection dogs.
9. This notion of the Concept is consistent with the Bonn museum’s agenda and
discourse as well (see Maier 1988).
10. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, November 19, 1999, p. 5.
11. Rainer Eckert quoted in Der Spiegel, Nr. 41, p. 19, October 1999.
12. Associated Press World Stream—German. October 10, 1999.
13. In Christian Schmidt, “Leipzig: Die Siege rim Freudentaumel.” Junge Welt,
October 11, 1999. Ͻhttp://www.jungewelt.deϾ
14. Schäfer quoted on Haus der Geshichte Web site, Ͻhttp://www.hdg.de/Final/
eng/oage 141.htmϾ
15. Deutschland, Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik 2001. Einsichten:
Diktatur und Widerstand in der DDR. Leipzig: Reclam Verlag.
16. This was reported to me by an employee of the museum shop, located at the exit
to the exhibits.
17. Abwicklung, meaning “to unwind” as well as “to liquidate,” entailed the
restructuring of East German universities through the dissolution departments and
institutes, dismissal of East German faculty members (20 percent of professors and 60
percent of mid-level lecturers) and the appointment of West German academics and
concomitant influx of West German research agendas (see Maier 1997).
18. See also Ten Dyke 2001.
19. See, e.g., Bauman 1992; Betts 2000; Borneman 1992; Drakulic 1991.
20. The play with words cannot be captured in translation here as the German term,
“geil,” draws on the different colloquial meanings of “cool” and “horny.”
21. These are well-known brand names of East German products.
22. German:
Sie möchten gute Bundesbürger sein
Und kaufen in der Kaufhalle Ostprodukte ein
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Spee und Florena, Rotkäppchen und Fit
Wie Lange macht das der Verfassungschutz noch mit?
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