Rochus wonders why no one’s mentioned this feature in the SZ mag. It's a compilation of descriptions of everyday racism in a variety of communities in the east, including Berlin. It's unnerving to read, even if you've been Ganz Brav and haven't been ignoring the occasional coverage of racist attacks in the papers, and even if you're not so stubborn/willfully ignorant as to think that those are the only such instances. The small sample in the SZ invites us to consider the scope of the problem beyond these interviews.
As a sort of aside: is it really better in the west? I was caught off guard by that last section. [Edit: the whole point of the article is to demonstrate that this is a specifically eastern German problem.]
There's a show up at the Ludwig collection in Oberhausen. Unfortunately it's closing in May, and with a move looming I don't really see myself making it over to Germany anytime soon. Maybe I can get the catalog. Meantime, here's a review.
The collection is Peter and Irene Ludwig's. It's been a bit mysterious to me because I've never been able to find any up-to-date info on it; all of the print references I could find were from the '80s. But now, all of a sudden (seemingly), the website has a lot more information. Anyway: in the 1970s and 1980s they put together a good amount of East German art, which is interesting to me on two fronts: first just for the works themselves, and second for the nature of the collectors' focus. West German chocolate magnates interested in East German art? Well, it's interesting to me, at least, and Hans Haacke did something nice with it once. But anyway:
„Deutsche Bilder aus der Sammlung Ludwig“ zeigt erstmals miteinander Werke von Künstlern aus Deutschland Ost und Deutschland West aus der Sammlung Ludwig gleichberechtigt auf einer Augenhöhe: Die Ausstellung will dem in den vergangenen Jahren oft verbissen geführten Bilderstreit durch das Miteinander der Bilder eine erlebbare Gestalt geben: der deutsch-deutsche Bilderstreit als eine Begegnung der Bilder.
So the show is dedicated to both East and West German art. Back in the day, Ludwig was accused of favoring East German artists (sorry, no citations). Apparently the foundation is making a first foray into getting past the whole Bilderstreit thing. Can we call it Bilderstreitsbewältigung?
(I can't muster any really interesting insights into Ludwig and collecting and GDR art and anti/revisionism right now. Maybe next time.)
[via Ostblog]
Following my own suggestion, I'm looking in Flickr to see what kind of Groups have "DDR" as a tag.
So far: Berliner Fliesen
Images of Communism
Postcommunism
And possibly less DDR-specific, German Decay (Decay! Decay!).
Not bad.
Two new things in the area of material history of the GDR. First, the DDR Museum Berlin, which plans to open in late spring of this year. From their front page:
Vor 16 Jahren hörte die DDR auf zu existieren. Seitdem haben zahlreiche Ausstellungen zur Berliner Mauer, zur innerdeutschen Grenze oder zur Stasi-Überwachung eröffnet - keine einzige dagegen zeigt das Leben und Aufwachsen in diesem Staat in allen Facetten.
Trotz allem ist das Interesse an diesem Leben ungebrochen: Ostalgie-Shows auf RTL, Ampelmännchen-Gerichtsverfahren oder Kinofilme wie NVA machen dies deutlich. Objektiv und beschreibend wird diese Nachfrage nach Information allerdings nicht befriedigt.
Diese Lücke schließt das DDR Museum Berlin: Alltagsleben eines vergangenen Staates zum Anfassen, egal ob Trabant, Fernseher oder MuFuTi!
Well, of course there's the Dokumentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR in Eisenhüttenstadt, but maybe they mean in Berlin. Anyway, we'll have to wait to see whether they can really conjure up an "objective and descriptive" approach. In the meantime, the picture gallery is pretty. "Nostalgie pur" indeed.
Second, and more compelling to me at the moment, there's Alltagsspuren. People seek out evidence of the GDR, take snaps, and send it in to the project organizer, who catalogs them and puts them online. I just found this and haven't had time to really look through it all yet: public painting, stained glass, and sculpture; slogans and other signs on buildings; ads (including the restored VEB Feinkost sign and the Milchbar Pinguin in Leipzig); and other remainders. Pretty neat. The cooperative aspect of it makes it especially interesting to me. I suppose it's not so different from setting up a DDR-group in Flickr, but Rene Zimmer, the organizer, does write a brief essay for the Alltagsspur of the month, which I'll take as an indication that he wants to provide some context for the stuff he's gathering. Hope he can keep up with it; already there are so many images I'd like to know the story behind. Hey, maybe he needs some writers...
Wish I could see some of these talks at Frankfurt/O.
From the description:
Aus der Distanz von 15 Jahren wird die Gesellschaft der DDR betrachtet,
des untergegangenen zweiten deutschen Staates. 15 Jahre sind ein kurzer
Zeitraum. Das bedeutet, ein abgeklärtes, ausgewogenes, alle verfügbaren
Archivmaterialien berücksichtigendes Urteil ist noch nicht zu erwarten.
Das tun wird (sic) dann auch nicht, sondern wollen sowohl Zeitzeugen, die noch zur Verfügung stehen, und Forscher befragen, wie sich ihnen heute, nach 15 Jahren, bestimmte Aspekte der DDR Gesellschaft darstellen...
"...in der Lehre an den deutschen Hochschulen."
At H-Soz-u-Kult, Gerd Dietrich reviews Jens Hüttmann's Die 'Gelehrte DDR' und ihre Akteure. Inhalte, Motivationen, Strategien: Die DDR als Gegenstand von Lehre und Forschung.
Ostblog linked to this analysis of the East German situation at the FAZ. It's a summary of statistics from the last decade, which the author, Klaus Schroeder, uses (or perhaps manipulates; I can't necessarily vouch for anything) to explain what's gone on in the East since 1990. At any rate, it's one attempt to explain how things got where they are today.
Mrs. T. at FoE has posted on the right's gains in Sunday's elections. She suggests that ignoring those reps in parliament will send a message:
When an NPD man started to speak in Dresden, the representatives of all the other parties left the room. And they did the same thing when the DVU’s top candidate began to speak in Potsdam. Here, I think is the proper response to the presence of nazis in a democracy’s parliament. Let no one speak to them; let no one acknowledge them...Democrats of every stripe should make it plain to nazi voters that they have effectively spoilt their ballots.
Will that work?
At der Spiegel, an interview with Rem Koolhas on the topic of the disappearance of East Germany's buildings. It's (obviously) in German, but here are a few excerpts:
RK: ... when Germany was unified, in my opinion the tremendous potential of showing respect for the different cultural and social projects on both sides was thrown away. I am still very upset by the way that East German buildings are aggressively erased [his word is "extinguished"-h], especially when this happens in the name of History. It's absurd to eliminate the historical in the name of History.
Spiegel: How, in your opinion, did it come to this?
RK: It was due less to ignorance than to intolerance. There was a predominantly dogmatic way of looking at the city of Berlin, one which sought to rid the city of the remainders of the ideology that had been fought against in the Cold War. The dismantling of the Palace of the Republic was also an act of revenge for the dismantling of the (City) Palace by the Communists. For me, not saving the Palace of the Republic was a similar crime.
...
Spiegel: [what about the idea to rebuild the Hohenzollern's City Palace?]
RK: This is a sad idea at its core, but it has a lot of supporters. In Germany, the weight of history makes it difficult to make rational decisions. And naturally, the idea of reconstructing the City Palace is also an attempt to erase a historical epoch--and simultaneously to show the people in eastern Germany: your life was for nothing.
[via Ostblog.]
FYI:
Jon Olsen has reviewed Goodbye, Lenin! for H-German.
(Haven't read this yet, but it's worth a look: Jon's dissertation deals with public memory and representation in the GDR.)
Ok, the title is a little jargony, but I was thinking about Tom's response to my post about the Ostalgie panels and I think he makes a good point that maybe better expresses some of the things I was getting at:
No matter how hard I try, I don't have the freedom to be objective regarding the GDR (not 'unfortunately,' I just don't). But this ambivalent (or multivalent) position in relation to the GDR on the one hand and to one's own history and the degree of 'arrival' [or 'at-home-ness'–h] in contemporary Germany on the other apparently creates a push-pull effect with considerable potential. It may be that, after the first wave–largely ignored in the West–and the second, more superficial wave of Ostalgie, we're now facing a third. Given that the "social advertising campaign" [of the federal govt., I assume–h] has run its course and capitalism can return to business as usual, this third wave might orient itself more towards the social basis and the conditions on/in relation to which the GDR was founded.
Hmm. Sounds very interesting to me. What resonance might the founding ideas of East German socialism have now (regardless of their later abuse)? How do they compare with what's going on in the FedRep at the moment? And in fact, could we maybe get similar results by turning to the roots of the SPD, which seems to be pretty far afield these days?
for Tom's original text,
So sehr ich mich auch bemühe, die Freiheit, objektiv zu sein, habe ich im Blick auf die DDR nicht. (nicht: leider, nur: nicht;) Aber genau diese ambivalente (oder multivalente) Haltung zur DDR einerseits, zur eigenen Geschichte und dem Grad des Ankommens im jetzigen Deutschland andererseits ergibt offensichtlich ein Spannungsfeld mit viel Potential. Möglicherweise steht uns nach der, im Westen kaum beachteten, ersten und der oberflächlichen zweiten Ostalgiewelle bald noch eine dritte bevor, die sich angesichts dessen, daß der Kapitalismus nach der sozialen Werbekampagne in Westdeutschland nun wieder zur Tagesordnung übergeht, auch an den sozialistischen Grundlagen und den Umständen der Entstehung der DDR orientiert.
I heard a number of excellent and useful definitions of Ostalgie at the German Culture Panels of the Popular Culture Association conference this weekend. Sebastian Heiduschke suggested that Ostalgie was a means of laying claim to a collective memory--and pointed out that the term was already appearing in 1991 (huh; the earliest reference I'd found was in 1996). Perhaps the best-developed interpretation was that presented by Joe Jozwiak and Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak, which applied post-colonial theory to Sonnenallee and Goodbye, Lenin. Someone made the excellent point that if we think of unification as a type of colonialization, and former East Germans as a marginalized group within German society, we can use postcolonial theory to understand the possibilities of multiple viewpoints.
...
Another very keen observation by the same person (unfortunately I never learned this woman's name) was that if Ostalgie is recalling a past that never was quite as it is remembered, a model for understanding it might be the Heimat movement of the 1950s. This, I think, was the most striking observation for me.
Both Anne Hector (who spoke on Christoph Hein's Willenbrock and Jana Hensel's Zonenkinder) and I found ourselves pushing an Anti-Ostalgie, a term which cropped up in a few other papers, as well. I'm still not sure what this is, but I think that for me, it involves a multivalent perspective on the GDR. This might be something between collective memory and biography or personal experience. At times I feel that outside observers, like myself, can compile statistical information and perhaps even interpret historical documents in factual terms, but that no one can tell the East Germans what happened to them. The "GDR" (i.e., not the state but the larger phenomenon) is too bound up in life experience, in the subjectivity of the people who lived there/then and now live somewhere/time else.
Ostblog has noted recently (here, here, and here) reactions to Martina Rellin's book Klar bin ich eine Ost-Frau!. The publisher says:
In the tradition of Maxie Wander, Martina Rellin writes a remarkable and authentic book that sheds light on the differences and commonalities between East and West...In the process she makes the surprising discovery that eastern women are less oriented towards consumption, less anti-desire [lusfeindlich], more life-affirming, self-assured, and more willing to take risks than their counterparts in the West. And the experience of the Wende has left them even stronger than they already were.
Sounds like a good read, right? To be tied to Wander is a real honor; Wander's Guten Morgen, du Schöne is widely considered the most important description of women's lives in the GDR. Like Wander, Rellin conducted interviews with East German women (14 of them). But the response to Rellin's book (which I haven't read yet) is tepid at best. It seems that Rellin, a West German who's lived in the East for ten years still has something of the "Besserwisser" in her. Not to say "Besserwessi;" her position as a transplanted westerner shouldn't preclude her being able to make accurate or even insightful observations based on the interviews she conducted. But it seems that Rellin employs a lot of cliches. Marika Bent at the Märkische Allgemeine writes,
Whereas Maxie Wander wanted to convey a critical image of society, Rellin is interested in confirming her own image of the savvy, energetic, tolerant Eastern woman, whom she herself would like to emulate. Thus the book becomes suspenseful at certain points at which the interviewees fall out of these particular pigeonholes: "Lots of people in the West are just too lazy to work," says the organic farmer Conny, without even noticing the insulting stereotype she's using. Eastern women are, after all, just people (but so are Western women).
Hmm. Seems to put the lie to the publisher's description; repeating someone's stereotyped notion of the West German is no way to "shed light on the differences between East and West."
Birgit Walter at the Berliner Zeitung writes a terrific, scathing review of the book in which she focuses on Rellin's notion of the kind of life a woman should try to lead, tying womanhood to 'having it all:'
[The right kind of life to lead is] that of Eastern women, because they practice the lifestyle of "Full-time employment with child." Western women, on the other hand, "haven't yet internalized this necessity."[...]The single thesis of the book consists of the already sufficiently accepted fact that many more women were employed in the East than in the West...She posits that "the topic of the Ostfrau is becoming more and more current," because eastern women have "answers to questions we're increasingly concerned with." Rellin's answers are very simple: be self-assured, work, have children, save the nation from extinction, and then, well, you'll never be depressed again.
I think as more reviews are published this will develop into an interesting public discussion of East German identity past and present. Can't wait to have a look at the book myself.
"Spring Breeeeeak! Yeah!" - Milhouse
I am facing a "week off." This of course means that I don't have any time off, but I do have a little more time to focus on some of the things that I desperately need to finish. The first of these will be the paper I'm giving on Kunst in der DDR on a panel about Ostalgie at the Conference of the Popular Culture Association next month.
When I proposed the paper, we were in the thick of the most recent Ostalgie craze, and I was a little annoyed to see the Berlin Nationalgalerie's exhibition mentioned in conjunction with the sensationalizing tv shows and even Good Bye Lenin, because I saw KidDDR as an anomaly within the rest of the nostalgic reminiscence that was going on. Now the challenge is to articulate why (if indeed) it was different.
I remember reading sometime around January, in places I can no longer find, that the wave of nostalgia for the GDR was over. Seemed unlikely to me at the time, and now as I look around to see what people are saying about it at the moment, I see that the general consensus is that Ostalgie is still with us.
Seriously: Andreas Krause at the Berliner Zeitung:
Kritiker dieser Kuschel-DDR fürchten die Verharmlosung der untergegangenen Diktatur. Das ist ja gerade der Zweck des ganzen Zaubers. Man kann von der Popkultur kaum verlangen, in schöner Ausgewogenheit die Ergebnisse historischer Forschung unter die Leute zu bringen. Zumal es bei der Ostalgie nicht um die DDR, sondern um das Verhältnis der Deutschen zu sich selbst fast 15 Jahre nach der Wende geht.
And less seriously: A report on the furniture store Möbel Höffner, which is selling mugs bearing the emblem of the GDR (or an alternate design with a Trabi). The director of the Stasi-Memorial in Hohenschönhausen protests that this is a "slap in the face" for victims of the regime. (Here's the Berliner Zeitung's extremely unimpressed reaction to the same thing.) This was all a few weeks ago, though; might be water under the bridge now.
[update: Ah, yes; one of the places I had read about the end of Ostalgie was here, at a trustworthy source.]
At Ostblog, I read about the landfill where the asbestos-laden scrap from the Palace of the Republic had landed, out along the Havel somewhere (full story at the Märkische Allgemeine). It got me wondering what the status of the Palace's dismantling was, and I found this interesting story at the MDR, which tried to trace all of the stuff left inside the building: dishes, furniture, fixtures, etc:
Wir finden heraus, dass vor allem das Geschirr des Palastes in einem Antiquitätenladen am Berliner Kuhdamm gelandet ist. 3,5 Millionen Teile hatte der Inhaber übernommen. Offensichtlich hatte er das richtige Gespür: Die Nachfrage war so groß, dass es mittlerweile kein einziges vollständiges Service mehr gibt, nur noch Einzelstücke. Nach Angaben des Händlers waren es vor allem Westberliner, die sich für die Hinterlassenschaften aus dem Palast interessiert haben, vom Arbeiter bis zum Promi.
Darn. No Palast-Geschirr for me, I guess. I'm still looking around to see what the schedule for tearing down the building is.
Mini-Update: Neues Deutschland reports on the coming "invasion" of Chinese terra-cotta soldiers in the Palace, where they'll be on display from late March until the end of June. Apparently the construction company had to re-install steel beams and electricity, and come up with things like emergency exits, to the tune of about 40 thousand Euro. Nothing like investing in a ruin-to-be!
Mrs. Tilton at A Fistful of Euros has written a great post on the proposed end to conscription in Germany. Best of all, she called Renate Schmidt "Minister for Puppies and Sad-Eyed Children (or something like that)." Hi-larious.
But really: the end of Wehrdienst and, with it, Zivildienst, could spell a real problem for social services in Germany. Mrs. T. points out that the country's dependence on the cheap labor in the Kindergarten and Pflegeheim sector provided by Zivis has kept military conscription in place, not as you (I) might have expected, the other way around. Huh.
I bet it will also pose a problem by eliminating that year or so of time "off" before kids go into Ausbildungsplätze--themselves few and far between anymore. The Süddeutsche reports that in 2003 there were 231.000 high school graduates and 83.500 open Lehrstellen for them to fill. I assume that some of this slack is taken up each year, or at least delayed, by people doing their Zivi or Bundi stint.
I just came across a review in the Morgenpost on H.N. Semjon's kioskshop, a permanent installation/gallery right across the street from our house in Schröderstraße. The reviewer draws comparisons between Semjon and Warhol; Oldenburg seems more accurate. Apparently at Markus Richter, Semjon also did a Duchamp and exhibited an old GDR-era toilet.
From kioskshop's press release:
Over 1000 "Product Sculptures," are at the center of this walk-in artwork, product packagings with their contents covered in white wax...The painterly white and the estranging effect of the waxed "Product Sculptures," the minimal design of the white fixtures and the brightly lit room create a distance and transcend the well-known store ambiance to another kind of perception and understanding of ones surroundings. The experience is analogous to standing before a painting, the work creates a distance and simultaneously piques a kind of curiosity.
It's all ghostly and very pretty. But because this is a semi-permanent project, with every "product" based on the same scheme (slightly modified by the artist then covered in wax), the effects of estrangement and fascination mentioned above are fairly short-lived. Seen one wax-covered coke bottle, seen 'em all. I don't mean to undermine the overall impression the shop makes, though, because walking past at night it really is striking; the products seem caught out of time. And there's something to be said for serial objects, competetively priced: 3 Euros for a water bottle.
Ostblog declares: es ist vorbei!
Ostalgie has burnt itself out. Can this be true? Those of us in the profession of history (or whatever this is) should take note...
:)
From the Leipziger Volkszeitung, a report on the new building that will house Leipzig's Museum der bildenden Künste. 16 months late and over budget, the museum should open in the coming fall. It is meant to replace the museum's original building, which was destroyed in WWII. The collection has been in provisional housing for half a century, so this is a big deal.
This new building has created some scandal because, as evident in the photo, it's , well, big and square and grey. Not bad on its own, I'd say, but in the context of downtown Leipzig, which is quite charming overall, it probably seems a little out of place. I'm sure the residents are just happy not to be walking past "die Lücke" anymore. Now they can walk by "den Klotz."
Anyway, the best thing about a nice big building (as we know here at UT) is that there will finally be space for the whole collection. No more itty bitty shows with just a few things. Or so I hope. Leipzig has a huge collection of GDR artists and I'd love to be able to visit just to see them hung with dignity.
Egon Krenz has been released from prison early. Apparently he was already serving a pseudo-term, in an arrangement in which he was released during the day to work (!) and returned at night to the prison...Here's the Guardian's story.
In Fluchtpunkte, the Stadtmuseum Jena addresses abstraction in the GDR. This is one of the first shows to do so in the aftermath of Kunst in der DDR; I wonder whether it demonstrates any recognizable influence from the Berlin show (even if they started planning it ealier, which they no doubt did).
In the brief text on the museum's site, I think I see my thesis is filtering through:
Künstlerische Eigenständigkeit und Originalität war hier selten an der nonfigurativen Praxis des Westens geschult, sondern meist figürlich vom Erbe der Klassischen Moderne geprägt.
Artistic independence and originality (abstraction in this case) in the East, it asserts, was rarely schooled by the non-figurative work of the West, but instead was formally related to the legacy of classical modernity. This is the kind of thing that Kunst in der DDR was working towards: the idea that creative development in the GDR was largely independent of what went on in the West. If this thesis is true, it's harder to argue that abstraction in the East was derivative or second-rate.
Not that I'm suggesting this is a new idea; anyone who's considered Hermann Glöckner's work and his broad influence on younger artists knows that there were plenty of sources at home...
Werner Tübke's archive will be housed at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nürnberg. Apparently the Museum is also interested in procurring the personal archives of Wolfgang Mattheuer and Volker Stelzmann.
Not sure why I thought this necessary to post, but I guess it's in part because of the Sitte-Stiftung news from last week. Where are the archives of Heisig and Metzkes? I suppose I should already know.
For fun, I suggest checking out the grandaddy of Socialist-Realist murals, the Panorama Museum in Bad Frankenhausen.
A Norwegian artist has an installation up in the Alex U-Bahn station. His work, says the website's description,
questions the manners of change that the DDR is going through. From the wide range of possible answers he chose a drastic perspective: values and demands of the DDR are dissolved. What's left are the 5 new federal countries that submitted to the mechanisms of marketing and commercialization.
[...]
The billboards lead to an analysis of the DDR - transformation process without promoting a particular approach. They rather confront the viewer with his/her own ideas. They might be distinctive or superficial, clear or distorted by Ostalgia, rational or emotional - a tension is created that leads to an analysis of the subject.
What this amounts to, it seems, is a range of logos made out of the letters DDR and plastered into the poster spaces along the U-Bahn tunnel walls. It's an empty gesture, if you ask me. There's neither critique nor playfulness in the project, and rather than "confronting the viewer with his own ideas" these logos as a whole offer only one approach: commercialization of the memory of the GDR. Which is fine, in itself; in so many iterations, though, it's just boring. On the other hand, in the individual designs there are barely discernable traces of well-known product logos, which makes for an interesting viewing experience; but again, it's at best just puzzle-like and gets old fast.
Of course, I might have a different interpretation if I saw the things in person. Maybe. The installation is up until March.
Via OSTBLOG, news that Willi Sitte will donate the works he currently has in his studio to a gallery made just for them in Merseburg.
The MZ reported Monday that a foundation had been created to manage the works and gallery, which will host its first show, a retrospective, in 2005.
This is one way of resolving the various squabbles surrounding Sitte's work as head of the VbKD in the 70s and 80s. Rather than negotiate with other museums, make your own...not that I think it's necessarily a bad idea.
At the Frankfurter Rundschau, an excellent essay on the status of GDR history and The Historians, by Lindenberger and Sabrow (both at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Studien in Potsdam):
Von der Öffentlichkeit kaum bemerkt, ist in den letzten Jahren die Renaissance der Totalitarismustheorie in Agonie übergegangen. Sie hat forschungspraktisch nicht gehalten, was sie geschichtspolitisch versprach. Die DDR erweist sich als umso komplizierter, je gründlicher sich die Forschung auf die konkreten historischen Grundlagen ihrer vierzigjährigen Existenz einlässt, anstatt nach Bestätigungen geschichtsphilosophischer Glaubenssätze zu suchen. Weniger die klaren Konturen totaler Herrschaft als vielmehr Aporien, Antinomien und Paradoxien prägten die Entwicklung dieses Staates. Je nachdem, unter welchem Blickwinkel sie betrachtet wird, ändert sie ihre Gestalt. Sie verkörpert zusammen mit ihrem westdeutschen Zwilling den Fortgang deutscher Nationalgeschichte in der Zeit der staatlichen Teilung, aber sie steht auch für die Preisgabe nationaler Eigenständigkeit auf dem Weg der Integration in den Ostblock. Sie präsentiert sich vom Anfang her betrachtet als die Inszenierung eines radikalen Neuanfangs und sozialistischen Gesellschaftsexperiments, das schließlich an widrigen Umständen scheiterte, und sie zeigt sich von ihrem Ende her gesehen als fortschreitender Verfall einer im Ansatz realitätsblinden Utopie, als "Untergang auf Raten", wie schon 1993 ein Buchtitel verkündete.
via OSTBLOG (thanks, would've hated to miss this one!)
In last week's elections in Brandenburg, the PDS (and the SPD) suffered big losses. Die Zeit describes the shrinking representation of the PDS:
Das Protokoll vermerkt: „Beifall der Abg. Dr. Gesine Lötzsch, fraktionslos“. Petra Pau und Gesine Lötzsch, das ist alles, was von der PDS im Parlament übrig geblieben ist. Die Berlinerinnen holten bei der Bundestagswahl 2002 jeweils ein Direktmandat in den Bezirken Hellersdorf-Marzahn und Hohenschönhausen-Lichtenberg. Weil es für ein drittes nicht reichte, schrumpfte die PDS von einer Fraktion mit 37 Abgeordneten und 120 Mitarbeitern zur „Zwei-Frauen-AG“. Die „Reduzierung der Fraktionen im 15.Deutschen Bundestag“ sei auch ein Stück Integration des Ostens, sagte Wolfgang Thierse, als er die neue Legislaturperiode eröffnete. Seine Genugtuung über den Absturz der PDS war kaum zu überhören. Immerhin hatte ihn vier Jahre zuvor ausgerechnet Petra Pau im Bezirk Prenzlauer Berg überraschend geschlagen. Längst vergangene Zeiten.
Bernd Ulrich at die Zeit tries to understand the recent popularization of the past in Germany. Is Wortmann's Das Wunder von Bern, like Sonnenallee and Goodbye Lenin, evidence that Germans (chiefly West Germans) are finally "growing up" in their attitudes towards history? [There's more to it than that.]
Heute haben die meisten lebenden Deutschen sich persönlich nichts mehr vorzuwerfen, und sie finden auch kaum noch jemanden, dem man persönlich etwas vorwerfen könnte. Darum stünde so oder so die Verwandlung von persönlicher Schuld in politisch-historische Verantwortung an. Ein heikler Prozess, in dem das Gefühl für das Grauen und für die Gefährdung verloren gehen kann. Nun kommt, historisch zufällig, noch etwas Zweites hinzu: Da die Ökonomie labil wird, suchen die Deutschen neue Identitätsanker, nicht zuletzt in der Historie. Daraus ergibt sich leicht eine Tendenz zur Verkitschung, Verharmlosung, Verflachung. Geschichte, wo man gerne hingeht.
Just for fun: here's how Google translated a larger exerpt, including that same paragraph:
The Germans were with one another reconciled never as as today, and which is, in order to come on the dangers, naturally also delicately. That today still another revisionism did not threaten à la Ernst Nolte or also only before daring courage of trembling Neonationalismus à la Martin Walser. Nobody would come on the idea to explain the Gulag to the Prius from Auschwitz to or to charge the German complicity with German suffering or to explain also only Versailles as the actual place of birth of the Second World War. No, this reconciliation does not need displacing. The danger sees 21 at the beginning. Century differently out: Today most living Germans have to accuse themselves personally nothing more, and they find also hardly still someone, to which one could accuse personally something. Therefore in such a way or so the conversion of personal debt into political-historical responsibility would stand on. A delicate process, in which the feeling for the grey and for the endangerment can be lost. Now, historically coincidentally, still somewhat second is added: Since the economics becomes unstable, the Germans look for new identity anchor, not least in history. From it easily a tendency results to the Verkitschung, minimization, flattening. History, where one goes gladly.
Tony posted a comment with a link to his blog, in which he describes a recent trip to Berlin and parts east. It's a well-observed narrative, and I always like to see how other people understand the process of German division and unification. Hmm. Maybe I'll also get to have coffee with Tom next time I'm in town?
From Ostblog, another amazing link: DDR-Bilder is an exhibition of photography by Hans-Joachim Helwig-Wilson from 1958 to 1961. Organized by the Commissioner for Stasi Documents in Berlin, the show offers a visual description of Berlin just before and just after the construction of the Wall.
In German AND English! (haven't read the English text yet, though)
I've been waiting for all the summarizing critiques on Kunst in der DDR to come rolling in, but they're taking their time. Meanwhile: the AICA (international art critics' association) proclaimed KidDDR "exhibition of the year."
The Berliner Zeitung wonders why the show was so successful:
Möglicherweise...war die Anziehungskraft so stark, weil es die letzte "DDR-Schau" war und jetzt endlich der Zaun weg ist - für eine gesamtdeutsche Bilderausstellung. Dann könnte man endlich wieder richtig streiten.
I don't know if that's the reason the vast majority of the 210.000 visitors went, but I admit that I'm curious to see how things go from here: what will the first "Gesamtdeutsche" exhibition look like? How long until it happens? Who will organize it? Where will it be shown? What kind of conceptual framework will it have?
Walter Womacka, an artist who was a popular favorite in the GDR and whose work still graces Alexanderplatz (see here and here), will be given two shows this June. One a retrospective (will they have "Junges Paar am Strand", supposedly the best-known GDR painting ever?) and the other a show of his recent work. See the MOZ.
I really hope I get to see both shows. Womacka's use of color and "plakative" representation made him the target of his more avant garde contemporaries, and I have to say that from about 1959 on his work is pretty romper room. But Womacka is an interesting study in popular art, and a few works in the Nationalgalerie are from the late 1950s are quite interesting: see "Rübenhackerinnen" from 1956.
It's worth mentioning, I suppose, that Womacka wasn't included in "Kunst in der DDR," which effectively suggests that what he made wasn't in fact art per se. There's the trouble with the conception of that show: not enough context. Even including someone like Womacka as context would be better than leaving him out, wouldn't it? He was cited in a wall text or two, I think posited as something the Berliner Schule (Metzkes et al) were reacting against. But that's not the same as having a picture in the space.
Marike made an interesting comment on the possibility of Westalgie: West German leftists recalling Berlin in the good olde days when it was an island of radicals.
And then Andrew wondered in a later post (which I think I accidentally deleted!) whether there were older instances of Ostalgie: previous examples of longing for the East—maybe not the communist east, but something else far-from-here. Maybe he'd like to restate that original idea in response to this post?
I wonder if you combine the two things—nostalgia on the part of Western Lefties for the good old days, including, for some, the GDR, whether it could be understood using ideas applied to orientalism? I know people have already dealt with the West German leftists' attitude toward the GDR: but something like a division within the West German left, to the effect that some thought the GDR was "das bessere Deutschland" and some thought it was a failed approach to Communism/Socialism, or that neither of those systems were desirable, anyway.
Today I had a look at Ostblog's Interview page. Tom writes very intelligently about what it means to reevaluate the material and public culture of the GDR. On his own site, he says, he strives toward "value-free remembering," or recalling how things were without making any judgements about them.
Durch die relativ begrenzte und über Jahrzehnte fast konstante Produktpalette der DDR entsteht für ehemalige DDR-Bürger eine hohe Identifikation mit den Objekten und alltäglichen Dingen. Da diese dingliche Welt quasi über Nacht verschwand, wird sie für viele zu einer fast mystischen, heilen, vergangenen Welt.
Mein Ansatz ist das möglichst wertfreie Erinnern. Also: Was war und was war eben nicht...
He sometimes reprints older magazine articles in order to reconstruct old "stuctures of thought," to illustrate particular discussions. I think this is a really useful approach for understanding various modes of thinking in the GDR—if only from the side of official discourse.
Die Artikel aus Zeitschriften verwende ich, um Denkstrukturen aufzuzeichnen. Bestimmte Themen, die man dem Osten heute eher absprechen würde, wie z.B. Umweltbewußtsein, Werbung, technologische Leistungen, Computer etc., waren durchaus vorhanden, wenn oft auch aus anderen Gründen und mit anderem Vorzeichen als im Westen.
In Friday's Berliner Zeitung Eckhart Gillen asks,
"Verschenkt die Nationalgalerie mit der kontextfreien Kanonisierung, mit dem Verzicht auf historische Zäsuren, Auf- und Abbrüche, auf das Politische schlechthin, nicht gerade die Chance, das Besondere, ja das Aufregende dieser Kunst herauszuarbeiten?"
This has been the question I've posed to myself many times in considering the show. On the one hand, I understand the importance of finally allowing these works to function as, well, works of art. But they are so bound to their historical situations. As is any artwork. The wall texts never gave me enough information--and I already know most of this stuff. But maybe that's part of the strategy: assume that your audience has a certain level of knowledge about context and eventually, it will?
Gillen is an art historian deeply involved in writing the history of GDR art.
Read more: Selig in überzeitlicher Aura
Kommentar: Good bye, Osten
Ostkunst, letzter Aufruf
Der Osten, ganz nah
As the Kunst in der DDR show closed this week, I've started looking around for the press's final commentaries on the show and its implications for East German history. Here are the responses from the FAZ, the Berliner Zeitung, and the Tagesspiegel.
Commentary to follow once more of the papers have spoken.
OSTBLOG collects relevant news items pertaining to the GDR and its current reverberations. The motto is "nix ostalgie|nix ddr-show|lesen-sonst nix."
I like what he looks at. (Especially the advertisements. For all my attempts at objectivity, I never said I didn't have a GDR material culture fetish.)
While I haven't yet had time to collect them, I am about to choose some of the better (read: more frustrating) responses people have had to the news that someone wanted to build an GDR theme park in Berlin. Apparently this was the news story that got a lot of non-Germans thinking about Ostalgie.
Every response registers disbelief that people could be nostalgic for a repressive system, which the GDR most certainly was. But I doubt that it's the state apparatus that people are longing for. There were ways of living in that system, types of community or support networks that were somehow unique to it. Those who felt they belonged to that community are really missing it now. I don't just mean the fact that everyone had a job, or that childcare was easily available or other positive aspects of the socialist system (with the necessary caveats concerning the drawbacks of such state-sponsored social programs). I mean a sense of belonging, perhaps springing especially out of that particular type of adversity, which in the "integrated" Germany is totally lacking.
Digging around in the archives of "Die Zeit" I found a very early (so it seems to me) use of the word "Ostalgie." (Lots of the people I've been reading treat this term as if it had sprung fully-formed out of the ground just months ago.) In this article from 1996, "Was das Ostfernsehvolk gerne sieht - und was nicht", Christoph Dieckmann was meant to describe "What the Saxons like to watch" on t.v. At the moment there's a lot of discussion about the Germans "new" love of sanitized versions of East German history on t.v. Turns out that it's been around a long time:
Am 4. November 1995 vollzog das ZDF endlich die deutsche Einheit. An jenem Samstag abend gelang in glückhafter Weise die Vermittlung genuin ostdeutscher Lebensart an ein gesamtdeutsches Massenpublikum. In Thomas Gottschalks Sendung "Wetten, daß . . .?" war der 69jährige Erich Schwarz aus Schnepfenthal/Thüringen geladen. Dieser tat vor aller Augen, was er zu Hause heimlich tut, und trat trotz einer Rückgratverkrümmung binnen drei Minuten einhundertmal mit dem rechten Fuß an den Querbalken über der Wohnzimmertür. Diese Darbietung am sechsten Jahrestag der Halbmillionen-Demonstration auf dem Alexanderplatz gab exemplarisch Auskunft über Leistungsbereitschaft und Freizeitverhalten der Ostdeutschen. Gottschalk lobte Erich, nannte ihn "fit wie ein Turnschuh" und fragte den von Beifall Umbrausten, ob er daheim in Thüringen wohl wen zu grüßen wünsche. Trotz einer Sprachstörung stieß Erich Schwarz hervor: "Nürnberg!" Dafür gab's 4000 Mark. Dann kam Michael Jackson.
Later, Dieckmann relates a story about an acquaintance, a story that in many ways sums up the necessity of the "Selbsterfinderisch," or "handy," in everyday life in the GDR--as well as what happens when what was once necessity becomes obsolete.
Einst, Ende der achtziger Jahre, befand ich mich im Besitz einer Schwiegermutter an der Ostsee. Sie war in zweiter Ehe vermählt mit Sigi, einem besonders enthemmten Exemplar der Spezies DDRHeimwerker. Sigi wollte ganz Heringsdorf mit ARD und ZDF bestrahlen, was bislang an der Erdkrümmung gescheitert war. Nun fällte Sigi im Garten die Obstbäume und knallte einen fünfzig Meter hohen Stahlrohrquader als Kollektivantenne hinters Haus, um im Verein mit dem Berliner Fernsehturm die Erde terrestrisch zu entkrümmen. In anderen Orten empfingen die Bürgermeister im Frühjahr 1989 anonyme Drohbriefe: Ohne Schüssel auf dem Dach fällt die Kommunalwahl flach. Was Sigi damals ersehnte, hat er bekommen: Westfernsehen. Doch auf Sigi unerklärliche Weise ist nun auch der Westen DDR: der Staat von hier. Das Drüben fehlt, das Jenseits zu hier, die Alternative zum hiesigen Tag, und somit die alte Zeit. Das ist Ostalgie.
Andrew posted a comment which directed me to a very thoughtful article about the recent German phenomenon of Ostalgie.
While I'm still trying to figure out what Ostalgie actually means for the Germans, I also find myself wondering what it means for US commentators. More soon on the reception of that German behavior in the US.
I can't resist pointing out that the Guardian has wondered, "Can anyone be truly confident, knowing what we know about Ostalgie, that in a few years' time Iraqis will not themselves be gripped by something that will inevitably be dubbed Saddamania?"
Holy Smokes.
Is that a reasonable (or useful) comparison? Seems like we're dealing with two entirely different regimes, not to mention two VERY different "regime-changes." Oh, and two different systems/nations/identities, however that should be phrased.
