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Tender Rejection: The GermanDemocratic Republic Goes to theMuseumCharity ScribnerPublished online: 09 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Charity Scribner (2000) Tender Rejection: The German DemocraticRepublic Goes to the Museum, European Journal of English Studies, 4:2, 171-187

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Tender Rejection: The German Democratic RepublicGoes to the Museum

Charity ScribnerColumbia University

Berlin. Surrounded by a halo of light, a royal blue pant suit, circa 1973,hangs stiffly within the museum vitrine. This is a relic of East Germanpopular history, put on view for a demanding public. The garment isfashioned out of an easy-care fabric called ‘Present 20’, a one-hundred-percent synthetic textile developed by industrial engineers as part of aninitiative to better provide for the consumers of the former German Dem-ocratic Republic, an initiative issued from the highest echelons of theSocialist Unity Party. First introduced in 1969, the fabric was so named tocommemorate the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the GDR.At that point, few would have imagined that the party and the constellationof other Eastern European socialist governments would only survive an-other twenty years of planned production, limited expression and compro-mised desires. Fewer still would have anticipated the irony of the fact thatthe polyester fabric of this pant suit would outlive the ideology of Marxist-Leninism which, in part, brought it into existence.

This artifact of the failed utopian project of state socialism is one ofthousands which are currently being displayed in museums throughout theeastern half of Germany, now called the new federal states. Museum di-rectors there have entered a race to curate the communist past; in the pastfew years at least five separate exhibitions of GDR everday life and popu-lar culture have opened. The shows – with titles such as ‘The MiracleEconomy: Consumer Culture in the GDR in the 1960s’ and ‘Commoditiesfor Daily Use: Four Decades of Products Made in the GDR’ – participatein an emerging trend of recalling another way of life, that is life as it waslived under socialism. This mode of recollection has been activated atthree different levels: the museum, the archive, and the souvenir. Flankingand buttressing the spate of GDR museums are these two other instancesof ‘memory work’. On one side lie an array of pop culture phenomena

Correspondence: Charity Scribner, Center for Comparative Literature, Columbia Universi-ty, 608 West 11th Street, New York, NY 10025, U.S.A.

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which look back nostalgically to the GDR everyday, such as trinket-sizedTrabant automobiles on keychains. On the other side lies a more sombreand complex social and cultural formation, namely, the gradual opening ofthe archives of the GDR’s Ministry of State Security. Following the direc-tives of the party government, this ministry, more commonly known as‘the Stasi’, compiled classified reports which recorded in minute detail thelives of millions of individuals whose daily actions were considered tobear upon matters of national security interest. 22.31 Telephone rings. Noone answers. The object continues to read. 22.40 The object conversesbriefly with spouse. 23.02 Object’s spouse draws curtains in north-facingwindows. 23.10 Lamps extinguished.

After the armed forces, the Stasi was East Germany’s largest employer:its archives documented information on more than a quarter of its citizens.The key to the archives, a master repertoire containing a single index cardfor each Stasi staff member, informer, and object of surveillance, extendsfor more than a mile. Given that the Stasi archives played such a centralrole in every aspect of GDR life, not only in the public sphere but alsowithin that of the domestic, they necessarily continue to inform the cultur-al history which is unfolding in the postcommunist moment. As moredetails about the Stasi archive surface, eastern Germans struggle to figurethese reports into their own memories of life in a communist system. Oneproduct of this struggle is the current drive to curate everyday objects andephemera from the GDR.

Documents in the Stasi archives date from the entire forty-year lifespanof the GDR. Beginning in the late nineteen-forties, government officialssought to establish an efficient protocol or template for gathering andcataloguing information culled from a dense network of informants whocollaborated with central intelligence experts both officially and unoffi-cially. This template, which remained largely intact throughout the tenureof the Stasi, not only recorded data about the actions of individuals beingtracked by authorities, it also served, in a certain way, to produce thecontent of that which was being archived. What fitted in the blanks wasrecorded, classified, sedimented into place. What little exceeded this for-mula could not be housed within the archive. Like the projections for steeland wheat production made by hopeful socialist economists, the buildingof the Stasi archives can be seen as another facet of the GDR’s planned orcommand economy. In this case, what was being planned was not theproduction of wares, but rather the production of biographical informationabout friends and enemies of the socialist state. In 1969 Stasi administra-tors published a dictionary of official bureacractic terminology to maketheir own contribution to the GDR’s twentieth anniversary celebration.

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Proud editors made the dense reference manual available to the generalpublic; their goal was to standardize the usage of Stasi-speak, not onlyamongst their ranks but also beyond.

After the dissolution of the GDR, one of the first moves made by newpolitical leaders was to gain access to the Stasi archives and launch theproject to declassify its files. In 1990, they established the Bundes-beauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemali-gen DDR, an office of federal representatives which sought to investigatethe GDR’s Ministry of State Security.1 Since then, not a day has gone bywhen information of critical importance has not been released from thesearchives to both individuals and the media. Although the truth content ofthese documents remains to be determined, the effects they have exertedover the hearts and minds of Germans is monumental. The unsealing ofthis data has disclosed residents who informed on their neighbours inorder to appropriate their apartments, clergy who delivered testimoniescondemning parishioners with dissident interests, husbands who incrimi-nated their own wives. The massive impact of such revelations continuesboth to redefine the way Germans look back on their two histories and toadd shape to the nascent culture of unified Germany. Its valence withregard to current museum practices is particularly significant.

Along with the boom in exhibitions on GDR everyday life, the socio-economic emphasis in the former East German Republic is shifting fromthe mode of production to one of consumption. Smouldering factorieswhich once strove to produce ever-greater quantities of chemical com-pounds and heavy equipment have been closed and replaced by a frailservice economy (modelled after its Western European counterparts)which sustains itself on the fledgling tourist and culture industries. Themuseum exhibitions which salvage and display artifacts from the recentpast of the GDR can be read as symptoms of a new cultural tendency inwhich consumption is being privileged over and against the kind of pro-duction which characterized the planned economy of the former socialiststate. This shift – from production to consumption, from the collective tothe collection – operates within both the field of the archive and the fieldof the museum exhibition in contemporary German culture. What remainsto be considered is the critical difference in the way this operation works

1 Although the reformers, now called the Gauck Authority, commenced this process onlya few months after the opening of the Berlin Wall, many critical files had already beendestroyed by Stasi officers. In particular, files containing information on foreign agentsand details on the supportive and complicitous relationship between the Stasi and theGerman dissident group, the Red Army Faction (recently disbanded), were lost.

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in the two fields. Both the archive and the museum function as organs ofmemory: but how might they differ from one another temporally? How, inturn, does each affect the construction of national or cultural identities?

At its founding, the Stasi archival system faced the future: the genesisof its protocols set the stage for the way life would be lived in the GDR.Indeed, this repository of information would become an archive par excel-lence, since the roots of term ‘archive’ reach back to the Greek verbarchein, which carries two meanings at once: not only ‘to begin’ but also‘to rule’ or ‘to command’. In contradistinction, the word ‘museum’, asound-cousin to ‘mausoleum’, looks back to the past, its gaze alternatelymournful or melancholic. As a result of this retrospective orientation, theexhibitions of GDR everyday life couple together with the development ofa splinter of a market sector which caters to Germans’ nostalgic impulses.Just as the public rushes to see the GDR shows, they are also choosing tospend more and more on products and services which hark back to daysgone by. For instance, despite the recent proliferation of literary memoirsabout life in the GDR, bookshops must backorder the most popular texts;the same shops also prominently display memorabilia and board gamesinspired by collective memories of the GDR. In one game, called‘Gedächtnis’ or ‘Memory’, players can prove their mnemonic powers byrecalling the placement of overturned pairs of cards depicting images andicons once current in East Germany. At the new restaurant ‘Mauerblüm-chen’ or ‘Wallflower’ in East Berlin there is a two-day waiting list forreservations; the menu features Soljanka, a Ukrainian sausage stew whichwas a mainstay in factory canteens and often the signature dish at German-Soviet Friendship functions.

A new German word has surfaced to describe this trend: Ostalgie,derived from Nostalgie or nostalgia. Wrested of the letter n, the first sylla-ble becomes ost, the word for east; from the cold war up to the present thisword has been loaded with meaning for German speakers. Now that citi-zens from both halves of the country are labouring through the process ofunification, the struggle for the survival of local traditions has come to thefore. Since former GDR General Secretary Egon Krenz took the fatefuldecision in 1989 to open the Berlin Wall for free travel between the twoGermanies, the cultural and ideological transfer from west to east hassteadily accelerated. But many easterners have resisted the drive to unify,choosing instead to ‘test the west’ not only by launching a critique of itspolitical economy, but also by posing questions about the dominance ofwestern culture and custom. The product of this inquiry is a new German-German culture, a split national identity forged by the sparring of differentsensibilities.

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The former GDR maintained its fair share of museums and monumentsbefore the wall came down. Policy makers recognized the imperative todiscern a heritage separate from that of West Germany and so generouslydirected funds towards memorials which would legitimate the new social-ist nation. Exhibitions which highlighted the antifascist resistance move-ment, the Soviet liberation, and the life of the proletariat filled both muse-ums of fine art and the galleries of historical societies. Today many Ger-mans express their scepticism about the continuing desire to organizeexhibitions about GDR life; in this postcommunist cultural moment thenotion of nostalgia is highly contested. While some (mostly western) crit-ics dismiss this focus on the GDR past as overly sentimental, attributing itto a dysfunctional vanguard which has languished in its leftist delusion farbeyond the point of decency, others seek to rescue from opprobrium theright to wax nostalgic, arguing for the importance of cultural memory atthis time of transition. Indeed, many commentators argue that the FederalRepublic’s politics and technologies are mutating the life world of the newstates beyond recognition. As a result, the institution of the museum hasbecome one of the main sites upon which the battle about how to remem-ber the GDR is being waged. Such museums have become places of reck-oning, in which viewers might work through the complexities of Germa-ny’s divided history as well as the legacies of fascism and totalitarianismwhich subtend it.

Already in August 1989, West German curators organized the firstexhibition of GDR popular culture at the Habernoll Gallery near Frank-furt-am-Main. But this show, ‘SED: Stunning Eastern Design’, merelylampooned the ‘pallid universe’ of démodé East German consumer goods.The selection of GDR products depicted in the exhibition catalogue – fromfaded packets of vulcanized rubber condoms to cartons of ‘Speechless’cigars – apparently aimed to prove by object-lesson the superior tastes ofsophisticated westerners. But the more recent series of GDR shows, curat-ed predominantly by easterners, strive to present a more complicated im-age of everyday life under socialism, by focusing on the gains as well asthe losses of living with goods produced for a ‘classless’ society. One ofthe best examples of this kind of museum exhibition is the Open Depot.Located in the former model city of Eisenhüttenstadt, the Open Depotdraws heavily from its urban surroundings, bringing the everyday straightinto the calm of the museum gallery.

Not far from the Polish border, Eisenhüttenstadt is a city marked bythe history of Central Europe. After the founding of the GDR, Eisenhüt-tenstadt was established as Stalinstadt, the ‘first German socialist city’,only resuming the name Eisenhüttenstadt, or literally Steelworks City, in

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the mid-fifties, after Stalin’s death. Yet despite this name change, thecity, with its grid of wide boulevards and great chunks of socialist-realistmulti-storey buildings, betrays its Soviet satellite past. Intended as anindustrial centre where workers and their families would strive togetherto build a bright socialist future, the steel foundries – once the beatingheart of the collective – were erected on the site of a mass grave of Soviettroops.

Unlike many other East European cities, Eisenhüttenstadt has not yetrenamed most of its streets, so its citizens still reside at addresses namedafter communist revolutionaries like Karl-Liebknecht-Straße or Clara-Zet-kin-Ring. And the cityscape still bears a striking resemblance to the modelmetropolises of other socialist or formerly socialist nations, cities likeTallinn, Beijing and Havana. Standing in the middle of one of Eisenhüt-tenstadt’s boulevards (which even at midday poses little danger, since thetraffic is so light), one might catch a glimpse of a retired or unemployedresident perched at a window, elbows propped on a cushion, taking inwhatever is to be seen below. Upon closer inspection, one might alsonotice the small holes drilled beneath the window, just within arm’s reach.In recognition of various state holidays, it was once compulsory for goodGDR citizens to plug these holes with flagpoles from which would fluttereither the red, black and gold tricolor of the GDR or perhaps small bannersbearing the image of the peace dove, a ubiquitous symbol in East Germaneveryday life.

Since the Wende or ‘turn’ which signalled the advent of the new Ger-many in 1989, urban change has begun to manifest itself in Eisenhütten-stadt, albeit in fits and starts. Retail spaces once controlled by the statehave been privatized and let out to independent entrepreneurs, who aretrying to fill the gaps left by the collapse of state-controlled collectiveswith leaner, meaner businesses. A greengrocery that was once called‘Fruits and Vegetables’ now bears the family name of its new proprietor; asmall café once simply known as ‘The Buffet’ now brandishes the patentlywestern moniker, ‘C’est la vie’. Such transformations of Eisenhüttens-tadt’s toponymy started early on the road to a market economy. They alsoset the stage for later changes on a more monumental scale. In the pastyear, construction was completed on Eisenhüttenstadt’s flagship commer-cial centre, a sprawling shopping mall called City Center. This mecca ofconsumption bears a greater similarity to the American-style strip mallthan just its name. As has been the dominant trend in urban and suburbandevelopment in the United States in the postwar era, Eisenhüttenstadt’sCity Center stands at a remove from the traditional centre of the town,where almost everything lies within walking distance. Deceptively named,

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it squats over black asphalt acres of new parking lots which are accessibleby car or the infrequent municipal bus.

In the effort to reconstruct East European cities following the devasta-tion of World War II, state socialist urban planners sought to define thecentres of important cities with imposing architecture, like East Berlin’sfuturistic Television Tower and Warsaw’s bombastic wedding cake of ahigh-rise, the Palace of Culture. Visible from the furthest reaches of town,such structures operated to unify urban life and consolidate the central pow-er of the state administration. To this extent these structures complementedthe operations of Stasi archive custodians. Although Eisenhüttenstadt wasonce defined not by a vertiginous tower, but rather by the trundling, uni-form blocks of the Wohnkomplex designed in the early 1950s, the construc-tion of the new shopping centre has shifted the weight of the city, emptyingthe concrete arcades once peopled by workers mobilized to meet the social-ist plan. Originally erected to support a lifestyle of purported socialist free-dom, equality and unity, the Living Complex has been abandoned to thosewho cannot (or do not want to) meet the exigencies of market competition.Meanwhile, developers lay claim to the untapped profit potential of outly-ing areas. The city is decentred and begins to sprawl.

This transition prompts a series of economic, social and cultural ques-tions about the city’s socialist legacy and the uncertain future which awaitscitizens of the unified Germany. How can someone who grew up withinstate socialism navigate the evolving landscape? What are the consequenc-es of learning to adapt? With the reorientation of financial resources to-wards new concerns such as service, tourist and high-tech industries, aswell as the trafficking of lighter consumer goods, operations such as Ei-senhüttenstadt’s steel works, which once formed part of the industrial baseof the GDR’s economy, are collapsing and being decommissioned, leav-ing behind the hulking masses of obsolete technologies. With the disman-tling of heavy industry in the new states, has come the attendant trend ofmassive unemployment, particularly in the East.

Curator and cultural historian Andreas Ludwig, a citizen of Eisenhüt-tenstadt, is one of many eastern Germans trying to come to terms withsuch questions. In 1996, he secured funds from the German Ministry ofCulture to found a museum of GDR history and popular culture. He estab-lished the Open Depot, a museum which strives to collect and exhibiteveryday objects produced and consumed in the former GDR. One of theprogrammes fostered by the Center for the Documentation of EverydayLife in the GDR, the Depot takes up residence in the defunct nursery unitof Eisenhüttenstadt’s Living Complex. Although most of the nursery’soriginal fixtures have been removed, one can detect traces of the build-

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ing’s childhood: safety guards on the windows, toddler-sized toilets in therestrooms. Yet until its reincarnation as a museum, this building had falleninto disuse and had become a ghost of its former self.

Now living a kind of life-after-death, the Open Depot struggles tosmooth into place the imbricated layers of different cultural moments.With the influx of western consumer goods in the post-unification period,many residents of Eisenhüttenstadt have chosen to outfit their homes andworkplaces with upgraded furnishings and appliances. Up through thenineteen eighties, GDR families usually possessed no more than one tele-vision, manufactured by the ‘people’s own industry’ or the VolkseigenerBetrieb, more commonly known by its acronym, the V.E.B. Waiting listsof three to seven years for a puttering but reliable Trabant or Wartburgautomobile were to be expected, and nearly every home was furnishedwith a vaguely Scandinavian blond particle board wall unit of shelves andcabinets. Now, on trash collection days, the sidewalks of Eisenhüttenstadtare littered with such standard-issue possessions, which have been cast offin order to make room for more up-to-date wares.

Yet for some Eisenhüttenstadters, this gesture of jettisoning the out-moded seems to be arduous; supplanting the trusty old family radio with aJapanese-made stereo system is a freighted act for them. So, instead ofleaving the radio, the face of which bears the names of satellite radiostations in distant Bucharest and Minsk, to wait for the sanitation workers,some inhabitants of Eisenhüttenstadt opted to bequeath these artifacts toLudwig’s Open Depot. It is the belatedness of both these bequests and thecuratorial gesture on the part of the museum administration which distin-guishes the Open Depot from an archive. Whereas the order and structureof an archive determines its future content, Ludwig’s museum answersback to the past; it responds to a desire that certain aspects of GDR historynot be forgotten. While the archive is formulaic, the Open Depot is sponta-neous, responsive. Because of this, the smart display of V.E.B. goods mustseem odd to many of the museum’s visitors, since these objects weredesigned explicitly for their use value and not their exhibition value. Asrecent scholarship by historians of East German industrial design demon-strates, GDR designers were forced to conform to industry standards whichexplicitly privileged function over (and even at the expense of) form. Theartifacts amassed by Ludwig and his team were not manufactured with theendpoint of the aesthetic or collectible object in mind. Nevertheless, themuseum can mobilize these objects, like any other commodity, to effec-tively record part of the GDR’s history.

In the acquisition process, a group of museum staff, trained by Ludwigin the methods of oral history, interviewed the donors, posing questions

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not only about the provenance of the objects, but also about the donors’memories of the way they once lived with them or amongst them. Eachartifact, then, is coupled with the institutional record of a memory: in thisway it becomes a bearer of the past. Often donors recall the exact pricespaid for their goods; many of the bequests come bundled together withtheir original receipts. Although the interview records have yet to be madeaccessible to the public, much of the collection is open to view, as are thedensely inscribed guest-books, where visitors write their responses and,more importantly, reflect upon the thoughts of those who have come be-fore them.2 The museum’s objects range from paper products to heavymachinery. The paper collectibles – books, food wrappers and the like –are of materials so fragile, so acidic, that they appear much older than theirtrue ten or fifteen years. In contrast, the clumsy, leaden, but still functionalhousehold appliances and office equipment, blenders which weigh in attwenty pounds, adding machines at thirty, seem built to last an eternity,whether carefully curated in museums or wantonly cast off to the rubbishbins of history.

Whereas some rooms of the Open Depot contained case after case ofbarely distinguishable appliances, stacked catacombs of the GDR’s indus-trial history, elsewhere the curators had staged the objects in panoramas oflife as it was lived in the recent, but rapidly receding past. One such room,conceived as a representative bathroom, put on show the gamut of healthand beauty aids available to the East German consumer. Instantly recog-nizable were small pots of Florena hand creme, the blue disk-like contain-ers virtual clones of the Nivea tins which were (and are) a common sight inthe Federal Republic of Germany. Although the Florena tins were collect-ed by the Open Depot, they resonated differently in the register of memorythan many of the other objects. For unlike most GDR products, they hadnot been relegated to the past, but rather are still being produced anddistributed to drugstores and groceries. One woman from the eastern stateof Brandenburg remarked that she remained a loyal Florena consumer.‘It’s an effective product’, she insisted. ‘Why change?’

Florena has a liminal status. Not only can it be found both on thedrugstore shelf and in the museum vitrine, it also straddles the eras dividedby glasnost, the ‘velvet revolution’, and the incipient process of unifica-tion. Yet Florena tins are just one minuscule detail characterizing thecomplexity and contradiction of contemporary German-German culture.

2 Guest-books were a common sight in GDR museums, as were notebooks for recordingcomments and complaints for the managers of many institutions, such as schools,hospitals, and shops. Citizens were meant to understand that they played a decisive rolein policy-making and that administrators would take seriously their public criticism.

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Similarly, when browsing amongst the objects in the GDR exhibitions, thevisitor’s gaze is frequently arrested by the uncanny resemblance betweenthe objects staged for contemplation and those actually used in the man-agement of the museum. For instance, the curator’s office, furnished witha wall unit identical to those set out in the museum, might be mistaken forpart of the exhibition, were it not for the cellular phone poised on the desk.A curious Doppelgänger effect is at work: returning home, the visitorreencounters objects similar to those just seen in the gallery. The line blursbetween museum and real life, between past and present. If so many resi-dues of the GDR remain present, even beyond the museum, how then tounderstand the growing desire of Ludwig and other eastern German cura-tors to collect artifacts from the so-called ‘eastern time’? Or the public’sincreasing demand to extend museum shows about GDR popular cultureand to set these exhibitions in motion, sending them to travel from cities tomore remote communities? Perhaps the interest in these exhibitions stemsfrom a desire to legitimate the many positive memories eastern Germansstill associate with the V.E.B. object world, a world whose traces stilllinger within their homes. Or, alternatively, perhaps these exhibitions worktowards a ‘laying to rest’ of state socialist culture.

One critical point to consider with regard to these questions is this: thecurators have chosen to employ different installation strategies for arti-facts associated with private life and those associated with bureaucraticinstitutions. While objects used in the space of the home, such as those inthe above-mentioned bathroom scenario, tend to be propped in lifelikesettings, those from public offices – typewriters, telephones, binders forfiling documents in triplicate – are simply laid out on shelves, catalogue-style. This difference in display technique suggests that the curators preferto reanimate the moments which were lived behind closed doors, whileallowing the artifacts of public life to hibernate, albeit within view. EastGermans were just as likely and just as entitled to be house-proud aspeople from any culture, but it should not be forgotten that the space of thedomestic was the only place where any discontented resident of the GDRcould imagine for him or herself an internal emigration. The fact that thecollected instruments of bureaucracy lie dormant within the galleries ofthe Open Depot implies that eastern Germans still prefer to distance them-selves from the former state institutions. By placing these office wares onshelves, the curators deliver them to the dead, consigning them to a sepa-rate register of historical memory, one not unlike that of the archive.

Ludwig’s interests are shared by a handful of eastern curators; theexhibitions they have organized in the last year weave together to form amatrix of collective remembrance in the new states. But one show in

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particular stands out for its remarkable relation to the Open Depot, namely‘The Celebration of Holidays in the Everyday Life of the GDR Kindergar-ten’, the debut exhibition at the Childcare Museum of Brandenburg, locat-ed in the city of Oranienburg. Like the Open Depot, the Childcare Muse-um rechristens a municipal space that city planners had originally con-ceived as a nursery. Due to demographic changes in the post-turn period,many such day-care facilities have been closed down: since 1991, forty-eight Berlin-area centers have been closed down. Faced with an uncertainfuture in the unified Germany, many women of the new states opted toforestall or forego pregnancy. (From the turn until the mid-nineties, east-ern birthrates dropped by nearly half.) With the concomitant tendency formany women to be downshifted to part-time jobs or even to completeunemployment, many nurseries and kindergartens have been rendered su-perfluous. Wittingly or not, the programming of the new museums inEisenhüttenstadt and Oranienburg works to fill the vacuum, to close a gapmarked by an absent generation of children aged from one to seven.

The childcare museum was planned and is now directed by Frau DoktorHeidemarie Waninger, an educator who, some thirty years into a satisfy-ing and productive career, lost her job in the Brandenburg school system.Likewise, Eisenhüttenstadt’s Open Depot is staffed by a team of a dozenyoungish women and men, individuals who once would have left theirchildren off at the nursery in the early morning hours before punching theclock at the steel works. Instead of striving to meet the state goals ofindustrial production, today these women and men attend to the task ofcollecting the relics of the GDR past. Most of the museum staff lost theirjobs when the Eishenhüttenstadt factories cut back their operations in theearly nineties; the local cultural authorities hired them to work at the OpenDepot under the condition that they complete a vocational retraining pro-gram. Where the communal energies of East Germans were once directedtowards the twin plans of heavy industry and the steady growth of thelabor force, now, in the wake of state socialism’s collapse, the emphasishas changed. Where once the goal was reproduction, both industrial andbiological, today the raison d’être for many in Eisenhüttenstadt andOranienburg is one of remembering and recollecting. With the destructionof the Marxist grand narrative, citizens of the new states no longer heedthe modernist battle cry of ‘make it new’. Instead they find themselvesstirred to action by a different aesthetic and political imperative: to re-search and conserve the past, recoding it for the more consumer-friendlysociety of the new Germany.

A short walk from the Oranienburg railway station, the Childcare Mu-seum draws more visitors with each month, many of whom once worked

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as teachers in the former GDR. Here the curatorial team has extensivecontact with the public, as they devote hours each day to accepting dona-tions of school supplies and furnishings from visitors who then assist instaging objects like felt puppets and unused boxes of chalk in classroomscenarios. As with the Open Depot, the Childcare Museum’s collectionworks to trigger many memories of the not-so-distant past; the box ofchalk, seemingly banal to the uninitiated, might trigger a reverie of thesame magnitude as Proust’s chamomille-infused madeleine. Eavesdrop-ping on the visitors to the two museums one can vicariously experiencetheir wonder as small gasps occasionally punctuate the silence of the gal-leries. ‘Oh, we used to have one just like that’, said one. A kind of pride ofpossession, product loyalty from a time when the state sought to divert orsublimate the desire to consume. Remarks such as these belie the fact that,even as the GDR regime aimed to inculcate a productionist ethic in itscitizens, the pleasures of purchasing and owning property were neverentirely usurped.

Although few non-Germans have had the opportunity to visit the littleChildcare Museum, or for that matter even know that it exists, many are atleast somewhat familiar with the history of the city which surrounds it,namely Oranienburg. For not far from this museum loom the gates ofSachsenhausen, the concentration camp which was turned into a memorialsite in 1961, the same year the Berlin wall was erected. Over 100,000prisoners were killed in Sachsenhausen between 1936 and 1945. After theSoviet Army liberated the camp at the end of the war, they used thefacilities to contain political prisoners; by 1950, 10,000 of them had died.Efforts have been made in the post-turn period to renovate the site into amore substantial memorial: architect Daniel Libeskind was appointed toredesign the museum. Yet these steps have not been taken easily. SomeOranienburgers would prefer that the government apportion more of itslimited funds to develop and maintain memorials to the history of theGDR and fear that the Sachsenhausen museum will overshadow smallerprojects such as the Childcare Museum, distilling the city’s complex histo-ry down to a single, overdetermining historical moment, the Holocaust.Discord about the funding of the Sachsenhausen memorial is growing inOranienburg, but to date no one has lodged a complaint about the estab-lishment of the Childcare Museum.

The dynamic of protest about the different Oranienburg museums seemsto disclose an economy of memory and history, a circuit generated by thecompeting but not fully discrete histories of National and State Socialism,a circuit which Germans constantly retrace and redefine. This dynamiccommands the attention of many social and cultural critics in Germany

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today, among them Annette Simon, a practising psychotherapist whoserecently published essay, An Attempt to Explain the East German Moralityto Myself and to Others, analyzes the unification process and its conse-quences.3 Simon’s essay, illustrated with a smattering of sombre photo-graphs of eastern cityscapes, offers one of the fairest portraits of the GDRpast of all the books on unification which currently crowd the shelves ofGerman bookshops. Anchored in Simon’s own lived experience, the essaythen broadens and develops to reflect on contemporary German-Germansociety. The author dispassionately recalls her engagement with an oppo-sitional student group and the price she paid for supporting Czechoslovakdissidents in the seventies. Her parents, the well-known writers Christaand Gerhard Wolf, enjoyed professional and private privileges accordedby the government to but a few intellectuals. Until 1989, Christa Wolf wasone of the GDR’s best-known writers: her novels The Quest for Christa T.and No Place on Earth, among others, were hailed by critics in both theeast and the west for their subtle critique of state socialism and introspec-tive literary voice.4 But despite her parents’ prestige, Simon’s activism,minor though it was, was enough to excommunicate her from the innersanctum of what some might have called federal support, and many otherswould have called state control.

Training her gaze on the fundamental problems which undermined theGDR’s legitimacy, Simon takes up the question of how the state socialistlegacy figures into and modifies the larger history of Germany in thetwentieth century. She argues that many Germans accepted the country’sdivision, according to the London and Paris Treaties of 1954 and 1955, asthe due punishment for the crimes committed under Hitler, and saw theBerlin Wall and the barriers which clove the country in two as signs ofcollective guilt and atonement. As long as these architectural structuresremained intact, as long as the separated German twins were moving apartfrom one another, each developing her own institutional structures in re-sistance to her perception of the other, many Germans managed to con-vince themselves that, through this severing, amendment and reconcilia-tion for the Holocaust could be realized. Simon maintains that, with thewall’s dismantling and the transition to unification, or rather, as somewould have it, to reunification, Germans must reconfront the legacy offascism in a new geopolitical landscape. Given this, the current pressure to

3 Annette Simon, Versuch, mir und anderen die ostdeutsche Moral zu erklären (Giessen:Psychosozial-Verlag, 1995).

4 Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T., trans. Christopher Middleton (New York:Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1970), and No Place on Earth, trans. Jan van Heurck (NewYork: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1982).

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musealize German history, not only in the form of Holocaust monuments(and the heated, even theatrical debates which surround them) but also viathe explosion of GDR exhibitions, can be seen as an attempt to groundGerman-German identities in the material objects and structures whichremain behind. In the absence of the wall and other cold war symbols ofthe nation’s punishment-by-division, Germans see these museums as theenduring stigmata of their violent history.

Germans are not the only Europeans consumed with a kind of museumfever; ministries of culture in other countries have also devoted ever-greater resources to the project of historical commemoration. Many of thenew monuments which have been unveiled and museum exhibitions whichhave been opened aim to sweep up broad expanses of history. Like theirneighbours, Germans have participated in this trend of marking time: asJane Kramer points out, politicians once laboured to bring to term a pro-posed Holocaust monument which would occupy five acres of centralBerlin with its monolithic weight.5 Ultimately, however, their efforts werein vain. On a similar scale, curators in Budapest have undertaken thesalvaging of the colossal socialist-realist statues which former Soviet blocsremaindered after perestroika. But the rapid proliferation of GDR exhibi-tions sets itself apart from this museal tendency in several ways. Whilemost memorial projects tend toward the monumental, these GDR exhibi-tions focus on the miniature, the minor detail, the ephemeral. The conser-vation of these everyday objects seems to insist that the moments whichdotted the line between 1949 and 1989 not be forgotten, that the indeliblestain of the Holocaust should not obscure all other memory of recenthistory.

In the same vein as certain provincial museums of popular culture, suchas a small host of French sites maintained by curators schooled in theAnnales tradition, the shows in Eisenhüttenstadt and Oranienburg set mem-ory work into play on a more human scale by concentrating on householdobjects. By amassing and displaying these mundane artifacts, the curatorsLudwig and Waninger create a space where viewers can not only cometogether to debate their past and future, but where they can also identifyand insert their private lives, their own memories of countless tiny details,into the larger timeline of German history. Yet, this practice also raises aseries of urgent questions about the historicization of the GDR. Evenduring the brief forty-year life of the GDR, citizens were troubled by thenotion of a German national heritage or Erbe. What did it mean to be East

5 Jane Kramer, The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany (NewYork: Random House, 1996).

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German? What were the lines of filiation amongst the historical momentsof the first unification of German states in the nineteenth century, thelegacy of National Socialism, and the work-in-progress of Soviet-stylecommunism? These questions continue to register in the space of both thearchive and the contemporary museum.

To what extent might the curators and visitors of the GDR everyday-life shows be seeking refuge from the most difficult issues concerningGerman heritage? After all, these GDR museums concentrate on the pri-vate and the domestic, the realm of what East Germans called ‘nicheculture’. They assert that private lives were indeed led under communism,despite the state’s attempts to deny individualistic indulgences. But themuseum’s emphasis on niche culture comes over and against the docu-mentation of larger, state-sanctioned practices. In general, these GDR ex-hibitions do not encompass residues of state-organized events or representmany of the customs which once engaged citizens as a mass, such as thoserecorded in the Stasi archives. What would be the implications of an exhi-bition which aimed to make manifest the patterns of identification whichconnected the private to the monumental, the personal to the political inthe GDR past?

Paradoxically, the Open Depot and the Childcare Museum realize someof the goals which Soviet ministers of culture once envisioned. As BorisGroys argues, communist administrators sought to divest the museum ofits bourgeois legacy and to mobilize art for the cultural revolution.6 In anattempt to break down the barriers separating the active life of the workerfrom the contemplative life of the aesthete, new socialist-realist planswere drafted: not only to multiply the number of museums and to makethem readily accessible to the masses, but also to install art outside themuseum environment, virtually saturating public spaces with statues andmurals which would constantly signal the totality of state power. To someextent the GDR museums participate in this aesthetic, be it in reverse, asthey gather objects from the very recent past, or in some cases removethem from still-current popular culture and display them for contempla-tion. The curators’ principles of selection and the viewers’ responses tothese shows (which are diligently recorded in the guest books set out at theend of each exhibition) raise interesting questions about the sister dialec-tics amongst public and private space and memory. For while the inclusionof still-current objects like the Florena tins works to connect the museumexperience to the present moment, the effort to represent, in a larger sense,

6 Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avantgarde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Be-yond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992).

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an outmoded way of life helps the viewers, particularly those from theeast, to work through the awkward process of unification without losing acritical sense of difference – both from their own past and from the past ofWest Germany. Indeed, the practice of keeping these guest books is essen-tial to work being undertaken in these museums, since it both refers backto the GDR custom of public critique and establishes a forum for theexploration of collective memory in the post-turn period.

It is easy to dismiss the Open Depot and the Childcare Museum as somuch retrograde nostalgia, as many critics have done. Or perhaps to seethese museums as the anaesthetic to the most painful symptoms of theabsorption of the GDR into a market economy, where rage and despair areconveniently encrypted, segregated from the rest of life, submerged intothe unspeakable. But on closer examination, cannot it also be argued thatthese places of reckoning might set the stage for a requiem for commu-nism in this moment of transition? Although the opening of the Stasiarchives is a critical element in the process of coming to terms with theGDR past, it is only part of the picture. The narratives registered in thesearchives were prescribed and limited by a system which aimed to regimentboth the practice and the interpretation of real existing socialism; theycannot tell the whole story. Although the GDR museums also cannot makeany such totalizing claims, at least they provide a forum for the exchangeand contestation of individual and collective memories. These institutionswork together, then, the discourses of the archive custodian and the muse-um curator interpenetrating one another, suturing together the remains ofGDR popular history and keeping them present to memory.

Rather than diagnosing the GDR exhibitions as the fetishization of adiseased past, perhaps they can be regarded in a more positive light. Fornot only do they remind viewers of Germany’s divided history, a historydetermined by the crimes of fascism and totalitarianism, these exhibitionsalso help to concretize the work of memory for the successes and failuresof the socialist project. By recuperating household objects from the obso-lete communist industries, the exhibitions also work to distinguish twocultural moments, to mark the difference between the eastern time before1989 and the today of late capitalism as it is practised in the EuropeanUnion. By supporting these museums through patronage and the privatedonation of objects, citizens of the new states are working to define moreclearly the mark of difference which simultaneously separates and bindstogether Germany’s two histories. Instead of anxiously hoarding theseGDR relics in their own homes or sentencing them to oblivion, easternGermans are setting them apart, laying them to rest by installing them inthe museum environment. A kind of tender rejection, the growing desire to

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support and visit these museums can be seen in contradistinction to themore saturnine kind of memory, the melancholy fixation on the past.

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