East German Memory and Material Culture

The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and Material Culture
Author(s): Paul Betts

Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 72, No. 3 (September 2000), pp. 731-765
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and

Material Culture*
Paul Betts
University of Sussex
By now it is commonplace to assert that the events of 1989 have radically and
irreversibly transformed the face of Central European politics and culture.
Where only a decade ago the political topography of Europe seemed to be set
in cold war concrete for years to come, the speed and sweep of the East Bloc
revolutions recast everything anew. Empires fell, walls were breached, and
dictators toppled in what amounted to perhaps the greatest of all bicentennial
tributes to the spirit of 1789. Even though the late French historian Francois
Furet disqualified the upheavals as truly revolutionary on grounds that they
produced no new political idea, there was no stopping the rush of millennial
fervor attending the so-called annus mirabilis, or year of miracles. Indeed,
the events were hailed as nothing less than the long-awaited renaissance of
civil society, the emancipation of the second world, the rebirth of Eastern
Europe, the rebirth of history, and even the end of History.1 While it is
true that the wellsprings of reform lay in Poland, Hungary, and former Czechoslovakia, Germany enjoyed a preeminent place in this historical drama. Not
only did the sudden dismantling of the cold wars most potent political monument provide the most memorable media event symbolizing those wildfire
revolutions; in addition, its unfolding Reunification saga effectively framed
global discussion about the fate of postcold war Europe. That the political
map of Central Europe was splintering into ever smaller geopolitical units
while Germany was consolidating and enlarging its territory was not the only
cause for concern. Recollections of the German past and, in turn, the international anxiety about its bullish political future predictably invited widespread
* Research funding for this article was made possible by the University of North
Carolinas Junior Faculty Summer Research Grant Program and the Southern Regional
Education Board. Thanks also go to Lyman Johnson and the two JMH readers for their
constructive criticism.
1
Jean Cohen and Anthony Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge,
1992); Zbigniew Rau, ed., The Emergence of Civil Society in Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union (Boulder, Colo., 1991); Michael Roskin, The Rebirth of Eastern Europe
(Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1997); and Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the
Last Man (New York, 1992).
[The Journal of Modern History 72 (September 2000): 731765]
2000 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2000/7203-0004$02.00
All rights reserved.

732
Betts
debate and scrutiny.2 And even if the past ten years have seemingly all but
dispelled initial apprehension about a brown specter rehaunting Germany, the
historical meaning and legacy of Wiedervereinigunglike Germanys renewed capitolis still under constant reconstruction. Now that the camera
crews are gone, the doomsday prophecies have gone out of print, and the daily
negotiation of Reunification politics has moved from the noisy streets of Leipzig to closed-door Bundesbank deliberations, the study of these sea changes
has blossomed into a vigorous cottage industry of transatlantic scholarship.
Over the course of the decade the cast of storytellers has changed dramatically. Where the original explosion of events was the province of politicians,
diplomats, journalists, talk-show pundits, and documentary film teams, the
assessment of those heady days of 89 has largely passed to university seminar
rooms. Political scientists and diplomatic historians were the first to challenge
and revise early judgments, fruitfully drawing upon newly opened archives
and declassified documents to reexamine the causes of collapse, rethink the
legacy of glasnost, and weigh the viability of state socialism as a form of
modern government.3 Cultural historians too joined in to investigate the newly
minted fables of the Reconstruction. Not only have their new studies perceptively reinterpreted the well-worn cold war cliches of East German architecture, painting, and/or literature; they have also set their sights on interrogating
the very interplay of culture and memory.4 Perhaps the most industrious and
2
Harold James and Marla Stone, eds., When the Wall Came Down: Reactions to
German Unification (New York, 1992); and Robin Blackburn, ed., After the Fall: The
Failure of Communism (London, 1991).
3
Among the most important contributions are Charles Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis
of Communism and the Collapse of the East German State (Princeton, N.J., 1997);
Philip Zelikov and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A
Study in Statecraft (Cambridge, 1995); Heinrich Potthoff, Die Koalition der Vernunft:
Deutschlandpolitik in den 80er Jahren (Munich, 1995); Konrad Jarausch, The Rush to
German Unity (New York, 1994); Michael Huelshoff, Andrei Markovits, and Simon
Reich, eds., From the Bundesrepublik to Deutschland: German Politics after Reunification (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1993); Timothy Garton Ash, In Europes Name (New York,
1993); Hans Joa and Martin Kohli, eds., Der Zusammenbruch der DDR (Frankfurt,
1993); Elizabeth Pond, Beyond the Wall: Germanys Road to Unification (New York,
1993); Jeffrey Gedmin, The Hidden Hand: Gorbachev and the Collapse of East Germany (Washington, D.C., 1992); and Gert-Joachim Glasner and Ian Wallace, eds., The
German Revolution of 1989: Causes and Consequences (Oxford, 1992). Journalistic
accounts include Jane Kramer, The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the
New Germany (New York, 1996); Tina Rosenberg, The Haunted Land (New York,
1995); Wolfgang Kenntemich, ed., Das war die DDR: Das Buch zur ARD-Fernsehserie
(Berlin, 1993); Robert Darnton, Berlin Journal, 19891990 (New York, 1991); Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern (New York, 1990); and Klaus Hartung, Neunzehnhundertneunundachtzig (Frankfurt, 1990).
4
Jost Hermand and Marc Silberman, eds., Contentious Memories: Looking Back at
the GDR (New York, 1998); Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Socialist

East German Memory and Material Culture
733
visible of all the revisionists thus far have been the social historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and even psychologists who have devoted considerable
effort to studying the complex relationship between state and society, power
and consent. Applying methodological insights from oral history and the socalled history of the everyday, they have focused on the lost quotidian world
of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and, in particular, on the cultural
construction of personal, gender, and even class identities within real existing
socialism.5
Even so, there are a range of issues that warrant further consideration.
Among the most important is the new affinity between East German popular
memory and material culture, which is the subject of this essay. Certainly there
has been some discussion about the newfound East German Ostalgie toward
a fallen world based on socialist security and full employment, communal
solidarity and progressive welfare programs.6 More often than not, its focus is
upon the post-1989 success of East Germanys Reformed Communist Party,
Realism without Shores (Durham, N.C., 1997); Thomas Hoscislawski, Bauen zwischen
Macht und Ohnmacht: Architektur und Staedtebau in der DDR (Berlin, 1991); Martin
Damus, Malerei der DDR (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1991); David Bathrick, The Power
of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln, Nebr., 1995); Julia Hell, Postfascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History and the Literature of East Germany (Durham, N.C., 1997); Arthur Williams et al., German Literature at a Time of Change,
19891990: German Unity and Identity in Literary Perspective (Bern, 1991); Lawrence
McFalls, Communisms Collapse, Democracys Demise? The Cultural Context and
Consequences of the East German Revolution (New York, 1995); Manfred Jager, Kultur
und Politik in der DDR, 19451990 (Cologne, 1995); and Friederike Eigler and Peter
Pfeiffer, eds., Cultural Transformations in the New Germany (Columbia, S.C., 1993).
5
Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended: Transition and Identity in the German
Borderland (Berkeley, 1999); Wolfgang Engler, Die Ostdeutschen: Kunde von Einem
Verlorenen Land (Berlin, 1999); Konrad Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience:
Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York, 1999); Alf Ludtke and Peter
Becker, eds., Akten, Eingaben, Schaufenster: Die Erkundungen zu Herrschaft und Alltag (Berlin, 1997); Johannes Huinink and Karl Ulrich Mayer, eds., Kollektiv und Eigensinn: Lebenslaufe in der DDR und danach (Berlin, 1995); Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy
of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 19491989 (Oxford, 1995); Hartmut Kaelble, Juergen Kocka, and Hartmut Zwahr, eds., Sozialgeschichte der DDR (Stuttgart, 1994);
Elizabeth Boa and Janet Wharton, eds., Women and the Wende: Social Effects and
Cultural Reflections of the German Unification Process (Amsterdam, 1994); Armin
Mitter and Stefan Wolle, Untergang auf Raten: Unbekannte Kapitel der DDR-Geschichte (Munich, 1993); Alfons Silbermann, Das Wohn-Erlebnis in Ostdeutschland
(Cologne, 1993); Siegrid Meuschel, Legitimitat und Parteiherrschaft in der DDR
(Frankfurt, 1992); Ina Merkel, . . . Und Du, Frau an der Werkbank: Die DDR in den
50er Jahren (Berlin, 1990); and Hans-Joachim Maaz, Der Gefuhlsstau: Ein Psychogramm der DDR (Berlin, 1990).
6
See, e.g., the debated poll results reported in Stolz aufs eigene Leben, Der Spiegel
(July 3, 1995), pp. 4052; for an earlier scholarly analysis, see Ulrich Becker, Horst
Becker, and Walter Ruhland, Zwischen Angst und Aufbruch: Das Lebensgefuhl der
Deutschen in Ost und West nach der Wiedervereinigung (Dusseldorf, 1992).

734
Betts
or PDS.7 This article pursues a different tack, however: it seeks to explore the
privileged place of ex-GDR consumer objects within East German cultural
memory, paying specific attention to how and why they have emerged as new
historical markers of socialist experience and identity. This may strike some
readers as rather surprising, especially since the former GDR was rarely perceived as a genuine consumer culture. Most observers (particularly those in
the West) tended to characterize it as essentially a culture of privation, economic mismanagement, homogenized lifestyles, and East Bloc ennui. For
them, the well-publicized day trips of wide-eyed East Berliners feverishly
spending their welcome money on West German produce, furniture, and
VCRs only substantiated the long-standing cold war image of East German
suffering and consumer want.8 While no one would deny the significance of
such consumer tourism as an early expression of political liberation, it is only
part of the story. Less well known is that this initial Western shopping spree
has slowly given way to a new nostalgia among ex-GDR citizens for the relics
of their lost socialist world, be they everyday utensils, home furnishings, or
pop culture memorabilia. Such longing for the not-so-distant past, I would
argue, is more than simply an escapist defense mechanism against the chaos
and disenchantment of Reunification itself. Close analysis reveals the extent
to which this ongoing remembrance of things past is part and parcel of the
changing nature of East German historical consciousness since that revolutionary autumn more than ten years ago.
No doubt this East German nostalgia is directly linked to the fact that the
GDR has literally vanished from the political map. It was this speedy absorptionwhat East German detractors often called Kohl-onizationthat made
the GDR story so unique. Unlike the upheavals of its East Bloc neighbors,
East Germanys so-called peaceful revolution (sanfte Revolution) did not result
in the victory of diplomatic sovereignty and political independence. Make no
mistake: this is by no means to trivialize the East German peoples heroic
participation in the collective East Bloc campaign to free itself from Soviet
oppression. What distinguishes the East German case, however, is that once
the old regime collapsed, its citizensto the great consternation of leftist
7
Christian von Ditfurth, Ostalgie oder linke Alternative: Meine Reise durch die PDS
(Cologne, 1998).
8
Marc Fischer, After the Fall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History
(New York, 1995), p. 144. East German intellectuals were often equally caustic in
speaking of this banana republic: the population that, after years of subordination
and escape, had summoned up its strength and taken its fate into its own hands, and
that only yesterday appeared to strive nobly toward a radiant future, was transformed
into a horde of the possessed who, pressed back-to-stomach, mobbed [the West German
department stores] Hertie and Bilka in pursuit of the golden trinket. Stephan Heym,
Aschenmittwoch in der DDR, Der Spiegel (December 4, 1989).

735
intellectuals in both East and West Germanyvoted for quick reunion with
its cold war enemy, thereby sacrificing any possibility of national autonomy
and/or socialist reform. Whether or not one argues that this represented a
missed opportunity for building a viable third way democratic socialism is
immaterial at this juncture; the key point is that this so-called voluntary annexation forever severed East German history and memory.9
To this one might interject that such an uncoupling of history and memory
is hardly specific to post-1989 East German culture. After all, it is this very
disjunction that has earmarked the postmodern turn in Western academic thinking and historical writing for the past twenty years or so. Commonly this is
attributed to the deeply felt inadequacy of conventional history to explain both
the past and the present, as its once stable and stabilizing narratives have
fractured into countless unofficial stories, subculture testimonies, and private
recollections. Standard interpretations of these trends range from the decline
of the nation-state to the dissolution of collective identities, the reconfiguration
of public and private spheres, the ongoing mediaization of history, and/or the
changing significance of the past itself.10 But if these changes accurately describe new developments in the West, they are much more noticeable in the
former East Bloc. For if nothing else, the Central European revolutions of
1989 have dramatically illustrated that collective history and cultural memory
are by no means coterminous. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the exUSSR, where the former satellite states are in the throes of febrile narrative
reconstruction of both the past and the present. Given that language, culture,
and history were so closely patrolled in the former East Bloc, it is little wonder
that the postcold war era has witnessed a veritable explosion of new postSoviet histories and rediscovered national pasts.11
But again, East Germany remains an exception. Unlike other East Bloc
countries that commonly resuscitated long-lost national legends as postcold
war ballast and orientation, the GDR did not reinvoke dusty nationalist narratives. Perhaps this is the most salutary effect of its vaunted heritage of antifascism, which always served as the ideological touchstone of East German
state and society. While it is easy to see how the cherished self-image of a
triumphant working-class movement played a crucial role in enabling the GDR
to sidestep any Nazi association and/or Holocaust accountabilityits Party
9
Jonathan Osmond, The End of the GDR: Revolution and Voluntary Annexation,
in German History since 1800, ed. Mary Fulbrook (London, 1997), pp. 45472.
10
See, e.g., Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C., 1992); and Andrew Ross, ed., Universal Abandon? The Politics
of Postmodernism (Minneapolis, 1988).
11
Matthew Kraljic, ed., The Breakup of Communism: The Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe (New York, 1993); and Stephen White, ed., The Politics of Transition (Cambridge, 1993).

736
Betts
history always held that because communists were victimized by the fascist
capitalists they were by no means culpable for Nazi crimes12 it was nonetheless effective in short-circuiting dangerous revanchist fantasies. This antinationalist thrust was also related to the legacy of international socialism. Uninspiring as this ideology may have become for many GDR citizens by the
early 1970s, it still remained East Germanys primary language of social
solidarity and historical purpose. Erich Honeckers concerted state-level campaign in the late 1970s to commemorate German national historyreinventing, for example, Frederick the Great, Goethe, and Beethoven as protosocialistsin a dual attempt to conjoin past and present as well as citizen and state
was still limited to accentuating East Germanys particular inflection of East
Bloc socialism.13 That East German intellectuals worked to replace the older
liberation theology of international socialism with the utopian dream of panEuropean humanism during the late 1970s and early 1980s only reinforced
this antinationalism. And while no one can discount the disturbing wave of
immediate post-Reunification xenophobia and neo-Nazi violence, much of
which took place in West Germany as well, it did stay at the margins and has
continued to dissipate despite prolonged economic difficulties.14 What nationalist sentiment did animate the post-1989 phase was less about the German
political past than about its promising economic futurewhat philosopher
Jurgen Habermas rightly if derisively deemed Deutschemark nationalism.15
But even this benign form of Reunification euphoria did not last long. Both
West and East Germans soon realized that the heroic dismantling of the Berlin
Wall was nothing compared with confronting the more intractable mental wall
dividing Wessis and Ossis. Already by the time Reunification was made official
in October 1990 the televised fest of East-West German fraternity the year
before had become distant memory.16 German-German relations often degenerated into ugly bouts of repeated recriminations and mutual misunderstanding,
thus exposing the illusory quality of the long-cherished cold war dream of a
so-called Kulturnation that supposedly transcended geopolitical partition.17
12
Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge,
1997).
13
Alan Nothnagle, From Buchenwald to Bismarck: Historical Myth-Building in the
German Democratic Republic, 19451989, Central European History 26, no. 1
(1993): 91113.
14
For a good discussion of right-wing violence in East and West Germany, see
Michael Schmidt, The New Reich, trans. Daniel Horch (New York, 1993).
15
Jurgen Habermas, Der DM-Nationalismus, Die Zeit (March 30, 1990).
16
A good example of the short-lived Reunification euphoria can be found in the
collection of East and West German poetry inspired by the removal of the Wall; Karl
Otto Conrady, ed., Von einem Land und vom andern: Gedichte zur deutschen Wende,
19891990 (Leipzig, 1993).
17
Meuschel (n. 5 above), pp. 27382; and Marc Silberman, Problematizing the

737
The evident collapse of any idea of a united German culture after 1989 only
pointed up the larger problem of articulating any viable post-Reunification
national identity. Gunther Grass and Jurgen Habermas led the early leftist
crusade against the perils of nationalist romanticism, arguing that any new
postcold war German identity politics would unavoidably stir the ghosts of
the Nazi past.18 To this liberals and conservatives alike countered that nationalism ought not remain the exclusive property of the Radical Right and that
German patriotism could and should find new enlightened expression.19
However much the effort to construct a new German identity has been predictably (and many would say thankfully) confounded by its Nazi and cold
war legacies, it is undeniable that the nationalist agenda has gathered continued
strength in politics and public discussion.20 All the same, political reunification
has enjoyed little corresponding cultural expression so far. Such is certainly
the case in the fields of architecture, theater, painting, and even literature,
which have exhibited a kind of leave me out (ohne mich) attitude toward
converting Kultur into nationalist spectacle. This is quite important in light of
modern German history, not least because it is the first time that the world of
culture has lagged behind the world of politics in German nation building.
Whereas the nineteenth-century concept of the Kulturnation arose as compensation for political disunity in the decades preceding Germanys 1871 Unification and again in the cold war phase before Reunification, the events of 1989
have failed to generate any affirmative cultural representationwith the result
that the historical relationship between politics and culture has been reversed.
Contrary to the post-1989 political and economic imperatives to eliminate the
differences between East and West Germany as soon as possible, the world of
German cultureand this is one place where East and West Germans are in
agreementhas steered clear from the business of national(ist) narratives and
Socialist Public Sphere: Concepts and Consequences, in his edited What Remains?
East German Culture and the Postwar Public (Washington, D.C., 1997), p. 13.
18
Gunther Grass, Two StatesOne Nation? trans. Kristina Winston (London, 1990);
and Jurgen Habermas, Yet Again: A Unified Nation or Angry DM-Burghers? in
James and Stone, eds. (n. 2 above), pp. 86102.
19
For the liberals, see Robert Leicht, Ohne Patriotismus geht es nicht, Die Zeit
(January 29, 1993); Klaus Hartung, Die Nation gehort nicht den Rechten, Die Zeit
vermann, Zwei Staaten oder Einheit: Der dritte
(October 22, 1993); and Ulrich O
Weg als Fortsetzung des deutschen Sonderweges, Merkur 492 (February 1990): 91
106. For the conservatives, see Karl-Heinz Bohrer, Why We Are Not a Nationand
Why We Become One, in James and Stone, eds., pp. 6070; Botho Strauss, Anschwellender Bockgesang, Der Spiegel (February 8, 1993); and Heimo Schwilk and
Ulrich Schacht, eds., Die selbstbewusste Nation (Berlin, 1996).
20
Konrad Jarausch, Normalization or Renationalization? On Reinterpreting the German Past, in Rewriting the German Past: History and Identity in the New Germany,
ed. Richard Alter and Peter Monteath (N.J., 1997), pp. 2339.

738
Betts
image making. Instead, it has devoted its energies to something else altogether,
namely, the historical origins and development of this apparently insurmountable German-German difference.21
In an atmosphere in which inter-German cultural difference and not sameness dominate postcold war historiography, the changes have been particularly pronounced in the ex-GDR. This is more than merely saying that the
GDR pastlike its currency and political culturehas suddenly become instant history. At issue is that East German history has been liberated from
state surveillance and control. Indeed, the deregulation of the East German
past has unleashed a veritable free-for-all for new cultural squatters and carpetbaggers, whose historiographical perspectives have ranged from post-1989
exoticism about the wild, wild East to blatant exercises in political nostalgia.22 Just as the actual content of its history has been up for grabs, so too has
the very form of remembrance. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has
been a proliferation of new voices and alternative accounts challenging the
states manufactured monologue and former political economy of speech and
script. New oral histories, museum retrospectives, and personal reminiscences
abound about the unofficial peoples own experience.23 That Stephan Mosess 198990 series of photographic East German portraits was praised for
chronicling the people as the subject of history far removed from the theoretical musings of historians neatly captured the impulse to register those
subjective moments that usually escape the detection of conventional historical
inquiry.24 Whether one interprets this popular appropriation of real existing
socialism as its final ruin or ironic triumph is secondary here;25 of central
21
Rosmarie Beier, ed., Aufbau West, Aufbau Ost (Stuttgart, 1997); Christoph Klessmann and Georg Wagner, Das gespaltete Land: Leben in Deutschland, 19451990
(Munich, 1993); Wolfgang Kaschuba and Ute Mohrmann, eds., Blick-Wechsel OstWest: Beobachtungen zur Alltagsgeschichte in Ost- und Westdeutschland (Tubingen,
1992); and the special Deutschland, Deutschland issue of Kursbuch 109 (September
1992).
22
It should be noted that this nostalgia has not been confined to East Germany. For
sentimental reminiscences about the Bonn Republic, see Otthein Rammstedt and Gert
Schmidt, eds., BRD Ade! Vierzig Jahre in Ruck-Ansichten (Frankfurt, 1992).
23
Olaf Georg Klein, ed., Plotzlich war alles ganz anders (Cologne, 1994); Dirk
Philipsen, We Were the People: Voices from East Germanys Revolutionary Autumn of
1989 (Durham, N.C., 1993); Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato, and Dorothee
Wierling, eds., Die eigene Volkserfahrung: Eine Archaologie des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR (Berlin, 1991); John Borneman, After the Wall: East Meets West
in the New Berlin (New York, 1991); and Hans Mayer, Der Turm von Babel: Erinnerung an eine Deutsche Demokratische Republik (Frankfurt, 1991).
24
See Christoph Stozls Vorwort to Stephan Mosess Abschied und Anfang: Ostdeutsche Portrats, 19891990 (Ostfildern bei Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 78.
25
One observer even argued that the new attention toward GDR everyday culture

739
concern is that the states monopoly on social memory had been broken, as
Clio too lost her job as a pensioned government employee.
One of the most interesting sites of this new memory production has been
and continues to be the sphere of material culture. Much of this has to do with
the fact that it has played a decisive role in presenting and interpreting this
German-German difference. One can see this plainly in the display of East and
West German history at Bonns House of History (Haus der Geschichte)
museum, where these cold war rivals are contrasted largely in terms of material
output and commodity cultures.26 The tendency to refract complex political
issues through the lens of consumerism is certainly not limited to this permanent exhibition. Other more popular manifestations exist as well in which
the design of consumer durables functions as visual shorthand for GermanGerman dissimilarities. The difference between, say, a West German Mercedes
and an East German Trabant has not been construed simply as alternative
automobile styling but seized upon as the very expression of each countrys
historical destiny. Casting East German culture as fundamentally pre- or antimodern became a favorite West German parlor game after 1989. This could
be seen in the satirical West German compilation of East German advertising
films, Flotter Ost, or Dashing East. Even more glaring was the West German
exhibition catalog mockingly titled SED: Schones Einheit Design, translated
in English as SED: Stunning Eastern Design. In this case, two West Germans
journeyed to the GDR a few months before the opening of the Wall to undertake what they called a lightning archaeological excursion. Having collected
carloads of East German everyday objects ranging from soap labels to condoms, they exhibited these real-existing commodities within the gray everyday life of the GDR in a Frankfurt am Main gallery in December 1989. In
effect the show was a rather smug West German assessment (two catalog
subsections were titled The Galapagos Islands of Design? and The Battered
Cousin) of the touchingly human navete and chronic fetish deficit of
East German design. Their fascination stemmed from the belief that the GDR
has unwittingly preserved fossil wares which, twenty or thirty years ago, were
near and dear to us, confirming the degree to which the country became a
represented an ironic victory of the Party insofar as East German everyday life was
finally taken seriously. Andreas Ludwig, Vorwort, in his Tempolinsen und P2: Alltagskultur der DDR (Berlin, 1996), p. 9.
26
Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Zeitraume, Konzept, Architektur, Ausstellungen (Berlin, 1994); and Hermann Schafer, Alltagsgeschichte im
geteilten Deutschland: Zur Konzeption und Darstellung im Haus der Geschichte der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland, in Probleme der Musealisierung der doppelten Nachkriegsgeschichte, ed. Bernd Faulenbach and Franz-Josef Jelich (Essen, 1993), pp. 47
54.

740
Betts
time-warp zone in which product forms now obsolescent in the West could
continue to mutate in some frozen limbo.27 East German design was thus
enlisted to show how GDR life and culture remained in a precapitalist frozen
limbo of arrested development. Arguing that design is Dasein was more than
just subjecting GDR culture to a dark round of laughter and forgetting. There
was a more serious ideological sleight of hand at work. Not only did such
logic effectively reverse Marxs schema of history, as socialisms eventual
succession of capitalism was apparently disproved by the 1989 East Bloc revolutions; it also implied that the very idea of socialism, as judged by the output
and styling of everyday wares, was in essence unmodern. Once socialism had
been subtly removed from modernity in this manner, it became easy to reread
the events of 1989 as simply a desire to be modernthat is, Western. Modernity, at one point inseparable from the telos of socialism, now returned as
its nemesis. It was in this context that East German history was reworked as
a descriptive ethnography about the land that time forgot.28 Even if some
have tried to confront this crude formulation by celebrating East German cultural life as less materialistic and more noble in its austere simplicity than that
of the West,29 the pseudoanthropology of modernity/unmodernity still dominates the academic construction of German-German difference.30
27
Georg Bertsch and Ernst Hedler, SED: Schones Einheit Design (Cologne, 1994),
pp. 7 and 27. One journalist from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reviewing the
exhibition made a similar point in remarking: Spott und Schadenfreude bleiben dem
Besucher allerdings schnell in Halse stekken. Die gnadelose Harte und Widerspenstigkeit der Objekte erinnern an Hans Magnus Enzenbergers Bonmot, der reale existierenden Sozialismus sei das hochste Stadium der Unterentwicklung. Quoted in Michael
ppigkeit: Ein Ost-West Vergleich, in Vom
Andritzky, Karge Charme und bunte U
Bauhaus bis Bitterfeld: 41 Jahre DDR-Design, ed. Regine Halter (Giessen, 1991), p.
134.
28
In the words of one East German writer: Not to have to walk the treadmill of
capital, not to have to produce, sell, consume, take care of things ASAP: that too, is
the freedom of the East . . . and this different quality of time, this half-sleep time,
practically undisturbed by occasional campaigns to raise workers productivity, this
East-Time, according to the current exchange rate, is worth only an eighth of WestTime. Because it is worthless, it can be passed by unused, unobserved, unnoticed, just
like childrens time, which is not yet measured in hours and minutes, but rather by
what chances and moods happen to produce in the way of experience . . . the East exists
in a nature preserve for scientific and technical backwardness (Martin Ahrends, The
Great Waiting, or The Freedom of the East: An Obituary for Life in Sleeping Beautys
Castle, in James and Stone, eds. [n. 2 above], pp. 15860).
29
ber das Verschwinden einer
Gert Selle, Die verlorene Unschuld der Armut: U
Kulturdifferenz, in Halter, ed., pp. 5466.
30
Ilja Srubar, War der reale Sozialismus modern? Versuch einer strukturellen Bestimmung, Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Soziopsychologie 43 (1991): 41532.
See also Zbiegniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1989).

741
Yet this is not the way East Germans remember their past. In fact, the GDRs
consumer culture has undergone a transvaluation in the hearts and minds of
many former citizens. Here it pays to recall that in the old GDR, Western
goods commonly served as unrivaled cultural capital. According to prominent
East German psychiatrist Hans-Joachim Maaz, whose diagnosis of the GDR
became a best-seller in the wake of Reunification, there was nothing that
could beat the fetish value of western goods. Empty western beer or cola cans
were placed as ornaments on the shelves of the wall unit, plastic bags bearing
western advertisements were bartered, western clothes made the man. Real
shortages and inferior merchandise in our country, and the surplus of items
and quality luxuries in the West were the emotional background for a neverending and never-satisfying spiral of consumption. Thus we played Nouveau
Riche Family, a variation of the childrens game mine is better than yours,
in which western objects were the absolute measure.31 Even the party hierarchy reportedly succumbed to the same impulse, hoarding Western imports
(e.g., Volvo sedans, Philips televisions, and Blaupunkt phonographs) as signs
of status and power.32 Little wonder that 1989 was often interpreted as simply
the desire to enjoy long-sought Western goods after years of consumer frustration. Numerous eyewitness reports confirmed this view by dramatizing East
Germanys initial frenzied acquisition of Western things along with the sidewalk accumulation of discarded GDR televisions and radios, furniture and
clothes.33
What is so striking is how quickly the perceived relationship between East
and West German goods changed a few years later in the ex-GDR. Where
GDR goods once served as a source of perennial dissatisfaction and embarrassment, they later became emblems of pride and nostalgia. In part this is
because these formerly disdained articles suddenly became material reminders
of a vanished world, newly idealized fragments of a crumbled identity.34 But
31
Hans-Joachim Maaz, Behind the Wall: The Inner Life of Communist Germany,
trans. Margo Bettauer Dembo (New York, 1995), p. 86. According to another observer,
West German empty shampoo bottles were lined up in [East German] bathrooms like
icons for guests to see (Ina Merkel, Consumer Culture in the GDR, or How the
Struggle for Antimodernity Was Lost on the Battleground of Consumer Culture, in
Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth
Century, ed. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt [Cambridge, 1998],
p. 284). See also Reinhard Koch, Alltagswissen versus Ideologie? Theoretische und
empirische Beitrage zu einer Alltagsphanomenologie der DDR, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 20 (1989): 11415.
32
Der Spiegel 43:50 (December 11, 1989).
33
Fischer (n. 8 above), pp. 14648.
34
Becker, Becker, and Ruhland (n. 6 above), p. 56. Consider the words of one student
demonstrator from Leipzig: Auch stirbt bei mir jeder alten Weinsorte, jeder Zigarettenmarke, die hier verschwindet, ein Stuck meiner Identitat. So seltsam das klingen

742
Betts
more than this, the positive identification with these GDR goods was also a
paradoxical response to post-1989 consumer frustration. On the one hand, the
new political availability of long-sought Western things hardly meant that they
were affordable. Steep price tags and West German condescension only intensified German-German differences and heightened the old East German selfperception of being second-class citizens. On the other hand, East German
nostalgia was also fueled by the actual consumption of Western goods. Once
purchased, many of these coveted articles lost their nimbus of symbolic capital
and political magic and returned to the disenchanted world of hyped exchange-value, credit payments, and planned obsolescence. The point is that
the historical aura of German goods had been radically reversed: the former
longing for the emblems of a glamorous Western present had now been replaced by those from a fading Eastern past.35 The revived romance between
East Germans and their own material culture emerged in a variety of forms:
notable samples are the founding of numerous Trabant automobile clubs and
fan newsletters; the growing celebratory literature on GDR pop culture; the
reissue of socialist realist novels and East German rock albums; the conversion
of the old GDR customs house into the Palace of Tears nightclub, whose
decor and music explicitly evoked pre-1989 East Berlin; Frank Georgis proposal for a Disneyesque East German theme parkaptly titled Ossi Park
in which barbed wire, Trabants, mock Stasi agents, currency exchanges, and
even scratchy GDR toilet paper would all be used to elicit surrealized East
German life; the increasing post-1989 tendency among East German consumers to prefer products and foodstuffs with old GDR labels as symbols of what
one Rainer Gries calls East German continuity and identity; and grassroots
campaigns to save the ex-GDR radio station DT-64 and the iconic Ampelmannchen (the little traffic light figure that adorned GDR city crosswalks).36
mag, aber es hat einen realen Hintergrund: Durch die Art und Weise des Beitrittes
wurde nicht nur das zerruttete System der DDR beseitigt, sondern wurden auch Biographien, Identitaten und Hoffnungen ausgeloscht. Bernd Lindner and Ralph Gruneberger, eds., Demonteure: Biographien des Leipziger Herbst (Bielefeld, 1992), p. 241,
quoted in Rainer Gries, Der Geschmack der Heimat: Hurra, ich lebe noch!: Bausteine
zu einer Mentalitatgeschichte der Ostprodukte nach der Wende, in Ins Gehirn der
Masse Kriechen!: Werbung und Mentalitatsgeschichte, ed. Rainer Gries, Volker Ilgen,
and Dirk Schindelbeck (Darmstadt, 1995), p. 214.
35
Ralf Bartholomaus, Gegenstand, mein Liebling, in Halter, ed., p. 47.
36
Note the founding of the newsletters SuperTrabi and Du und Dein Trabi, along
with the book by Andreas Kamper and Reinhard Ulbrich, Wir und unser Trabant (Berlin, 1995); Gudrun Brandenburg, Die Treue kommt oft zu spat: Was nach der Wende
auf dem Sperrmull landete, is heute Objekt nostalgischer Begierden, Berliner Morgenpost (May 7, 1993); Anke Westphal, Mein wunderbarer Plattenbau, Hoppla, Wir
Leben Noch, Die Tageszeitung (August 25, 1995), pp. 1516; Heide Riedel, ed., Mit
uns zieht die neue Zeit: 40 Jahre DDR-Medien (Berlin, 1994); and Andreas Michaelis,
ed., DDR Souvenirs (Cologne, 1994); and Gries, pp. 193214.

743
That much of this was understood as a desperate gesture of cultural selfdefense was perhaps best articulated in the words of the cofounder of the East
Berlin Save the Ampelmannchen committee: If its truly a Reunification,
they need to recognize that the east has something to contribute, tooperhaps
not governments or cars, but other things.37
On one level it seems quite easy to explain this popular fascination with the
harmless hardware of a lost world as simply flea-market economics and what
exNew Forum leader Barbel Bohley termed a natural defense against the
ways Wessis rule us.38 That the initial East German dreams of an autonomous
GDR as a third way alternative political culture were overrun by Kohls
project to integrate the new Bundeslander into the West German orbit of
political and economic liberalism only confirmed the fear among many East
Germans that they were merely exchanging political masters in 1989. Such
political pessimism, coupled with economic recession, rising unemployment,
and growing social anxiety, inspired new nostalgia for the stability and solidarity of the old days. The changing lexicon used to describe these events is
itself instructive. Whereas the upheaval was first called a revolution, mounting
skepticism and disillusionment soon replaced that term with the less hopeful
turn or Wende; the old East German rallying cry We Are the People that
had just been converted into the rousing Reunification slogan We Are One
People then gave way to the blatantly nostalgic We Were the People.39 But
even this longing for a romanticized old world was constantly undermined by
post-1989 reports of widespread neglect and abuse.40 Bad enough that the
cultural ideals once underpinning the GDRs cosmology had all been rudely
relegated to the dustbin of history; worse still was that the long-running Trauerspiel of serialized Stasi disclosures about state corruption, widespread denunciation, and personal betrayal effectively blocked any real positive identification with the GDR past. Such revelations were all the more devastating to a
society that had long ago abandoned the state dreams of a victorious socialist
Volk in favor of what West German journalist Gunther Gaus famously described as a niche society composed of small circles of trusted friends and
family.41 The dramatic knowledge that these East German structures of socia37
Anna Mulrine, Icon Faces a Crossroads, U.S. News and World Report (February
2, 1998), p. 8.
38
Quoted in Fischer, p. 154.
39
See Dirk Philipsens introduction to his oral history of East Germans (n. 23 above),
pp. 56.
40
See, e.g., the post-1989 expose on the scandalous state of East German mental
hospitals in Ernst Klee, Irrsinn Ost, Irrsinn West: Psychiatrie in Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1993).
41
Gunther Gaus, Wo Deutschland liegt: Eine Ortbestimmung (Munich, 1986); and
Katharina Belwe, Zwischenmenschliche Entfremdung in der DDR, in Die DDR in
der Ara Honecker, ed. Gert-Joachim Glassner (Cologne, 1988), pp. 499513.

744
Betts
bility had been so thoroughly poisoned went hand in hand with the emerging
centrality of material culture. As one observer remarked, it was precisely the
exhaustion of these niches that paved the way for this pop culture pathos
and signaled how GDR cultural identification had migrated from the state to
society to obsolete relics.42 It was in this context that everyday objects assumed
their role as new privileged sites of emotion and memory, narrative production
and unbetrayed intimacy.
There was, however, still another overlooked reason for what might be
called this materialization of idealism: the changed role of East German
intellectuals. The strange cultural death of this group as a critical social force
has been a topic of growing academic attention of late.43 Much of this stems
from an effort to try to explain the surprising fact that East German intellectualsunlike their East Bloc brethrenplayed no leading role in the reconstruction fever of 1989. There was no real East German equivalent of Vaclav
Havel, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Janos Kis, Petre Roman, or Mircea Dinescu; nor
were GDR intellectuals integralagain in contradistinction to their East Bloc
comradesin shaping the demands and sentiments of the people after the
Fall.44 When they did intervene, as seen for example in the For Our Country
petition signed by many prominent GDR intellectuals in October 1989, they
tended to preach moderation, third way metaphysics, and gradual socialist
reform as the best political medicine. Noble as their struggle to reconstruct
civil society instead of the nation-state may have been, its message went unheeded among the citizenry. The isolation of the intellectuals from the people
was made quite plain by the tabloid Bild-Zeitung on the one-year anniversary
of the opening of the Wall, when it stated that Germanys intellectuals are
standing in the corner. The vast majority of them do not acknowledge this
significant day of German history.45 Granted, this was not perforce bad in
itself. Some argued that the distance of the intellectuals from the people was
good and necessary, especially since the Volk was in the midst of being seduced
by the siren songs of emigration, DM-nationalism, and political liberalism.
42
Mario Stumpfe, DDR Historische Gegenwart: Eine Reflexion, in Ludwig, ed.
(n. 25 above), pp. 14245; as well as McFalls (n. 4 above), p. 98.
43
Robert von Hallberg, ed., Literary Intellectuals and the Dissolution of the State:
Professionalism and Conformity in the GDR (Chicago, 1996); John Torpey, Intellectuals, Socialism and Dissent: The East German Opposition and Its Legacy (Minneapolis, 1995); and Andreas Huyssen, After the Wall: The Failure of German Intellectuals, in his Twilight Memories (New York, 1995), pp. 3766.
44
This sentiment found expression across the political spectrum from the West German right to East German radical left. See, e.g., Joachim Fests 1989 essay, The Silence
of the Clerks, in James and Stone, eds. (n. 2 above), pp. 5256; and the numerous
laments by East German intellectuals in Philipsen, esp. chap. 8.
45
Bild-Zeitung (November 9, 1990), quoted in von Hallberg, ed., p. 5.

745
Others contended that the marginalization of intellectuals simply underscored

the genuinely spontaneous and democratic nature of this bloodless peoples
revolution.46 But however much the intellectuals lamented the way in which
the dream of a revolutionary October turned into the nightmare of nationalism,47 it did not change the fact that they remained radically alienated from
the people both during and after the upheavals.48 No wonder this aspect of the
Wende has always been an awkward one for East German intellectuals, given
that theylike the state itselfwere theoretically the exponents of the beleaguered Volk.
To argue that this was simply political myopia neglects the ways in which
the episode represented the full inversion of the historical role of the German
intellectual. Here it is worth recalling that the nineteenth-century legacy of
these intellectuals had been to imagine and inspire a united Germany long
before it became geopolitical reality. Like other European intellectuals engaged
in similar national projects in the early nineteenth century, be they Hungarians,
Poles, Czechs, or Italians, German intellectualsparticularly poets, playwrights, and philosophersplayed an instrumental role in the cultural construction of the German nation during the decades preceding German unification.49 It was first under Bismarck (albeit only with limited success) and
particularly under Hitler (due above all to the violent exclusion of dissent) that
German politics and culture were effectively brought into line. After 1945 the
Russian project to remake East Germany in its own image assured that Lenins
shotgun marriage of intellectuals and the state continued in force in the GDR.50
What is so fascinating is that this situation has been reversed since Reunification. Once again the worlds of German politics and culture are running on
different registers, but this timein contrast to the nineteenth centurythe
intellectuals have furnished no viable new narratives of collectivity.51 In this
Torpey, pp. ixxiv.
The phrase is attributed to Hildegard Hamm-Brucher, as quoted in Klaus Hartung,
The Great Changing of the Wheel, or the Revolution without Utopia, in German
Unification and Its Discontents: Documents from a Peaceful Revolution, ed. Richard
Gray and Sabine Wilke (Seattle, 1996), p. 174.
48
One West German sociologist went so far as to say that the only thing that they
[East German intellectuals] brought into the unification process was their suffering.
Wolf Lepenies, Folgen einer unerhohten Begegenheit (Munich, 1992), quoted in Torpey, p. 184.
49
Tony Judt, 1989: The End of Which European Era? Daedalus 123, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 120.
50
Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of
Occupation, 19451949 (Cambridge, 1995).
51
Even the banal terms used to describe East Germany as it standsRest DDR
(leftover GDR) or simply neue Bundeslaender (new federal states)underline this
point.
46
47

746
Betts
regard the East German case is salient. Not only do intellectuals have little to
offer for the present or future; they have also lost even their former credibility
as spokespeople of their liquidated past. The scandalous revelations about the
Stasi complicity of prominent GDR intellectualsmost notably the high-profile controversies surrounding Christa Wolf and Sascha Andersononly deepened this widespread sense of betrayal and disillusionment. This was all the
more disheartening insofar as intellectuals were long regarded both inside and
outside East Germany as the very embodiment of what little pluralism and
counterculture existed before 1989. So what began as a healthy and longoverdue form of confronting the past ironically ended up confirming the
most primitive Western cold war propaganda about life on the other side of
the Wall, exposing the sad fact that there was virtually no alternative culture
and hence no dissident traditionleft to defend and romanticize.
For this reason East Germanys variant of the treason of the intellectuals
aided in spurring pop culture nostalgia. It was the collapse of ideals coupled
with the intellectuals failure to provide any alternative language of noncapitalist social solidarity that helped convert material culture into a new locus of
historical romanticism. Some may find this quite paradoxical, given the ongoing commercial exploitation of GDR history. Not only have its material
artifacts ended up at chic boutiques but in addition one can buy compact discs,
posters, and even GDR memory games (DDR Gedachtnis-Spiel and Ratsel
DDR: DDR Ratsel are two popular examples) based on the forlorn iconographica socialistica of East Germanys past. But even this crass commodification
of GDR history has not prevented the continual transference of former social
idealism from the realm of politics and intellectual culture to that of everyday
things. In a climate in which the whole German Democratic Republic (and,
with it, the whole East Bloc) is condemned as a failed experiment, these old
GDR objects arguably stand as Germanys last real alternative culture, the
remaindered hardware of a noncapitalist consumer society. In this way, they
have helped redefine present East German social identities now that the GDR
past and future have been robbed of revolutionary promise and historical teleology.
But it is not as if the whole GDR consumer past has been awash in the
warm glow of nostalgia. It is striking the extent to which much of the attention
has concentrated on the 1960s. The romanticization of this decade is hardly
coincidental. In the memories of many East Germans, the 1960s stand out as
a bright and hopeful decade between the exhausting production quotas of the
50s and the widespread disillusionment of the 70s.52 Again, this may seem
52
Lutz Niethammer, Erfahrungen und Strukturen: Prolegomena zu einer Geschichte
der Gesellschaft der DDR, in Kaelble, Kocka, and Zwahr, eds. (n. 5 above), p. 110.

747
strange to Western readers, particularly since the era opened with the 1961
construction of the Berlin Wall. Yet it is worth remembering that the Wall
acted as a short-term boon for the East German state insofar as it effectively
quelled West Germanys economic magnetism and staunched the embarrassing
no-confidence demographic plebiscite of westward migration. Once the political system was stabilized in this manner, the SED concentrated on building a novel socialist industrial culture. The very title of one recent exhibition
dedicated to recalling this decisive epochWunderwirtschaft, or miracle
economyis itself telling.53 It refers not only to West Germanys better
known economic miracle but also to the surprising achievements of hothouse
East German modernization. The buoyant optimism of the period makes more
sense if we bear in mind that East Germany first announced the end of food
and basic commodity rationing as late as 1958, bringing to a close twenty
years of East German consumer privation.54 Like West Germany, East Germany had been devastated by the war. But unlike its western counterpart, East
Germany received no Marshall Plan assistance; worse, Moscow demanded war
reparation payments from the GDR until 1953. What little leftover capital did
exist was invariably invested in heavy industry and export production in the
name of economic recovery. State planners reasoned that investment in the
consumer goods sector only diverted precious resources from all-important
industrial production; thus GDR citizens were given the bare minimum in
housing and consumer goods. By the early 1960s, however, the GDR economy
had recovered and even posted impressive results.55 By 1965 it ranked among
the worlds ten most prolific industrial producers. Now the time had come
when GDR citizens wanted a bigger piece of the pie, especially given the
meteoric West German take-off during the same period. Yet more was involved
than simply another replay of rising achievements breeding rising expectations.
What is often forgotten is that socialism itself was in part predicated on the
idea of prosperity for all workers, who were supposedly finally free from the
shackles of capitalist exploitation. It was therefore the materialist dimension
of Marxism that became the vital concern for many East Germans, not least
because the political revolution had already occurred some ten years before.
Under pressure to deliver on its promise, the ruling SED set out to remove the
last vestiges of its postwar rationing society and embark on its consumer
53
Ina Merkel, ed., Wunderwirtschaft: DDR-Konsumkultur in den 60er Jahren (Cologne, 1996).
54
Even so, rationing for meat, eggs, and butter was provisionally reintroduced in
1962. Jeffrey Kopstein, The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 19451989
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), p. 48.
55
Gernot Schneider, Wirtschaftswunder DDR: Anspruch und Realitat (Cologne,
1990).

748
Betts
version of the Great Leap Forward; at the Fifth Party Conference the socialist
slogan of Work, Bread, and Housing was changed, significantly, to the more
expansive secular theology of For Prosperity, Happiness, and Peace.56
Little wonder that 1960s modernization was shot through with paradoxes
and contradictions. It was hard enough on a material basis to try to keep up
with the Schmidts across the Wall by delivering modern washing machines,
refrigerators, furniture, radios, televisions, and automobiles to GDR citizens.
But East Germanys industrial economy was not built for consumer goods
production, with the result that consumers faced shortages and ever increasing
waiting lists for desired items.57 Closely linked to this was the thorny ideological problem of modern consumerism itself. The issue was not simply the
validity of dumping various consumer products on GDR society as the deserved fruit of socialist labor. The question was, rather, How could consumerism be reconciled with state socialisms dictatorship over needs?58 Would
it undermine or strengthen the relationship between citizen and state? The SED
knew all too well that this was a dangerous wager, especially if the consumer
gap with West Germany ever became too egregious (as it did). Still, the East
German government under Ulbricht and Honecker knew that something had
to be done to satisfy the modern consumer desires of its citizenry.59 As early
as January 1961 Ulbricht wrote a letter to Khrushchev expressing worry about
the long-term economic and political consequences of not investing in the
consumer goods sector: due to this, West Germany can constantly apply political pressure. The booming economy in West Germany, which is visible to
every citizen in the GDR, is the main reason that over ten years about two
million people have left our Republic. As Jeffrey Kopstein has noted, the
clear implication of this carefully worded letter was that the population demanded Western living standards but could not be counted on to suppress
consumption in order to get there.60
It was precisely in the sphere of consumerism where much of this political
pressure surfacednot surprisingly, since material prosperity and consumer
56
Ina Merkel, Der aufhaltsame Aufbruch in die Konsumgesellschaft, in her edited
Wunderwirtschaft, pp. 820.
57
Kopstein, esp. chap. 2; as well as Philip Bryson, The Consumer under Socialist
Planning: The East German Case (New York, 1984).
58
Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller, and Gyorgy Markus, Dictatorship over Needs: An
Analysis of Soviet Societies (Oxford, 1983), esp. pp. 45133.
59
Part of this crisis concerned how to socialize the GDRs dissatisfied Westernoriented youth culture. Gerlinde Irmscher, Der Westen im Ost-Alltag: DDR Jugendkultur in den sechziger Jahren, in Merkel, ed., pp. 18593; and Dorothee Wierling,
Die Jugend als innerer Feind: Konflikte in der Erziehungsdiktatur der 60er Jahre, in
Kaelble, Kocka, und Zwahr, eds., pp. 40425.
60
Both the excerpt from the Ulbricht letter to Khrushchev of January 18, 1961, and
the commentary are quoted in Kopstein, p. 44.

749
satisfaction were often used as yardsticks by both German governments to

measure progress and legitimacy. The SED was squeezed between market
ideology from the West and the consumer demands of its own populace. By
the end of the 1950s, preaching the virtues of deferred gratification (as one
common 50s slogan had it, the way we work today is the way we will live
tomorrow) was no longer tenable. Hoping to head off further popular disaffection, the state decided to hitch its destiny to the star of promised prosperity.
The foreword to the 1967 edition of the GDR consumer goods catalog, Centrum, was a good example. In it the SED stated: our ever-improving offering
[of goods] reflects the success of our republics active workers in the realization
of the New Economic System of planning and administration. The SEDs
Seventh Party Conference reinforces our commitment to fulfill our policy of
provision.61 While such concern was present during the 1950sas shown,
for example, by discussions about the importance of displaying winsome images of socialist consumer bounty in East German store windowsit reached
crisis proportions by the early 1960s.62 The decade thus witnessed a great
experiment not only in price planning, subsidized consumerism, and the introduction of the five-day work week but also in the bold creation of a more
attractive socialist consumer culture complete with state advertising agencies,
snazzy product packaging, modern furniture, household decoration magazines
and advice literature, self-service stores, mail-order clearinghouses, and even
state travel bureaus.63 Although there were always problems,64 this venture in
refrigerator socialism initially worked quite well in meeting the demands of
export production and domestic consumption. Goods that were long considered luxury itemssuch as washing machines and refrigeratorsbecame increasingly available to all levels of society, making East Germanys consumer
culture by far the most prosperous in the East Bloc.65 On this score its windfall
was as much political as economic in that the visible modernization of everyday life seemed to bespeak the future viability of the GDRs consumer socialism.
61
Quoted in Annette Kaminsky, Keine Zeit verlaufenbeim Versandhaus kaufen, in Merkel, ed., pp. 13233.
62
Katherine Pence, Schaufenster des sozialistischen Konsums: Texte der ostdeutschen Consumer Culture, in Ludtke and Becker, eds. (n. 5 above), pp. 91118.
63
For a good discussion of the SEDs price politics, see Andre Steiner, Zwischen
Frustration und Verschwendung, in Merkel, ed. (n. 53 above), pp. 2136.
64
For a good account of consumer complaints, see Felix Muhlberg, Wenn die Faust
auf den Tisch schlagt . . . Eingaben als Strategie zur Bewatigung des Alltags, in Merkel, ed., pp. 17584.
65
By 1967, 35 percent of East Germans owned refrigerators, while 46 percent had
washing machines. Gerlinde Irmscher, Arbeitsfrei mit Kusschen drauf, in Merkel,
ed., p. 47.

750
Betts
Whatever else can be said about it, the upheaval of 1989 dramatized just
how fragile and impossible this consumer policy gamble had become. The
remarkable boom eventually leveled off by the early 1970s, so much so that
what GDR consumer culture existed in the 70s and 80s was largely propped
up by loans from International Monetary Fund bankers and the West German
government. By this time it was too late to turn back, however, mainly because
the government knew that failing to continue providing even increasingly subpar consumer goods might breed further popular unrest. Although Honecker
tried to curb this problem by investing more capital in consumerism following
the Eighth Party Congress of 1971, the situation hardly improved. By the mid1970s it was plain that the states effort to marry socialism and modern consumerism was a losing game, if only for the simple reason that there were
as one East German scholar put italways more consumer desires than
consumer products.66 The 1960s consumer modernization had indeed revolutionized everyday life in the GDR, but, unfortunately for the SED, the newly
unleashed consumer desire could not be so easily regulated or satisfied. The
yearning for fashion, fantasy, and what Nietzsche once called the eternal
return of the new eventually became an intractable political menace and liability. Such dissatisfaction laced Lutz Niethammers oral history of older workers in the GDRs industrial provinces: their principal complaint was the neverchanging drabness of everyday life and scarcity of desired consumer items.67
Even if the GDR succeeded in providing its citizens with adequate housing,
foodstuffs, and everyday necessities, the ever present television images of the
West German consumer bonanza only pointed up the demoralizing differences
in the availability and quality of GDR consumer articles.68 As another historian
perceptively observed, the discrepancy between material privation and verbal
excess [by the SED] only succeeded in further arousing popular loathing and
consumer appetite, in turn creating a runaway inflation of desire that
scarcely could be controlled.69 The SEDs expansion of the countrys special
retail shopsExquisitladen, Intershops, and the Delikatladenduring the
1980s as a means of exploiting high-end consumer demand, pent-up savings,
and hard currency transfer from West to East only exacerbated popular resentment, not least because it flouted socialist ideals of social equality.70 The
economic malaise of the 70s and 80s then went hand in hand with growing
political disaffection, as state socialism (and this would be true throughout the
Merkel, ed., p. 12.
Niethammer, von Plato, and Wierling, eds. (n. 23 above), pp. 973.
68
On the importance of television in undermining the GDR state, see Borneman (n.
23 above), pp. 13342.
69
Jonathan Zatlin, The Vehicle of Desire: The Trabant, the Wartburg and the End
of the GDR, German History 15, no. 3 (1997): 358.
70
Kopstein (n. 54 above), p. 187; McFalls (n. 4 above), p. 95.
66
67

751
East Bloc) appeared to many as less the inheritor of the earth than an unrealizable pipe dream from a forgotten past.
Nevertheless, the post-1989 period has been marked by a new identification
with this doomed experiment in socialist consumerism. The miracle economy exposition is only one of several examples chronicling the degree to
which East Germansdespite the widespread perception that they were not
keeping up with West German standards of livingoften remember their own
economic miracle as a period of increased affluence, optimism, and comfort.
Additional evidence of the 1960s modernization of East German life can be
found in the 1996 show titled Tempolinsen und P2, which furnishes a sort
of unofficial history of the GDRs lost everyday culture. The title refers to
two well-known icons of 60s GDR consumer society. The first term alludes
to mass-produced boxes of quick-cooking lentilstempo lentilsthat were
introduced in the early 1960s to suit this new fast-paced GDR life. Given both
the loss of so much East German labor power to the West prior to the 1961
construction of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent intensified implementation
of the states heavy industrialization policies, the GDR government redoubled
its efforts to enlist women as badly needed additions to the labor force. The
specially packaged instant lentils were designed to alleviate the onerous double burden placed on women in terms of work life and home life demands,
in this case by easing the preparation of family meals. Hence this seemingly
innocent consumer product revealed the GDRs specific industrial and gender
policies.71 The second item was the so-called P2, the nickname for the prototype used for standardized apartment buildings built by the state from the early
1960s on. It served as the cornerstone of the SEDs industrial housing policy
all the way until 1989, and it captured a common component of GDR socialist
culture.72 Both of these objects were emblematic of the East German modernization of socialist time and space in the 1960s. Yet these recent exhibitions
about the ex-GDR material culture go far beyond design history proper; they
also illustrate the extent to which consumer objects were constitutive elements
in everyday East German memory and experience.
What is so intriguing about the Tempolinsen und P2 exhibition is the very
form of remembrance. Unlike conventional museum displays of material ob71
The same went for East Germanys hygiene and beauty industry. For a sharp
ber die widerspenanalysis, see Simone Tippach-Schneider, Wie Bist Du Weiss? U
stige Werbung im Sozialismus, in Schmerz lass nach: Drogerie-Werbung in der DDR
(Dresden, 1992), pp. 2134. For a thorough West German discussion, see Erica Carter,
How German Is She? Postwar West German Construction and the Consuming Woman
(Ann Arbor, Mich., 1997).
72
Ludwig, ed. (n. 25 above), p. 7. Other exhibitions include the 1991 Alltagsleben
in der DDR: Vom Zusammenbruch des Dritten Reiches bis zur Wende in Kommern
and the 1998 Gluck im Osten show at the Kulturbrauerei in Berlin.

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Betts
jects, scant attention was paid here to who designed the product, packaging,
or apartment model; nor was the focus on how the objects were designed. The
production side of material culture was virtually absent as well; even official
politics and state history enjoyed only marginal presence. Most surprising of
all is that the hallowed linchpins of socialist identitythe world of work and
the laboring communitywere hardly mentioned. Instead, it was the individual socialist consumer who occupied center stage. Lest there be any misunderstanding, I do not mean to imply that the self-understanding of East German
identity suddenly changed from producer to consumer; the numerous oral history projects since 1989 have made it clear that the identity and sense of selfworth of many ex-GDR citizens were closely linked to labor and production.73
Yet it does indicate that consumerism played a significant role in East German
culture as well, particularly in the memories of its citizens. Consider, for example, the following post-1989 recollection from the Wunderwirtschaft catalog:
I had to save a long time for the motorcycle. The thing cost me 1900 Marks at the
time. But it was worth it. It was the absolute best! A 250 Pannonia with benchseat and
radio. While I was braking my mother always slid off, something whichI must
admitalways amused me. I still remember that I constantly drove to see my future
wife in her village. Nobody had a motorbike there, which made mine a kind of status
symbol. I even had additional footrests installed for my small son. After that, the three
of us drove everywhere together! The people in the village thought that we were crazy
to drive around like that with a child on board. My in-laws were actually rather handsoff and never interfered in our affairs or told us what to docompletely unlike my
mother. She just didnt understand this kind of life, it was all so new. In any case I had
this motorcycle twelve years, exactly during my whole adolescent rebellious period.
We traveled all the time by bike and went everywhere with the thing. There are a lot
of other stories to tell.74
Of foremost importance is the way in which the personal history connected

with this mans motorcycle became the organizing principle of his narrated
past and individual identity.75 Indeed, it is the very banality of the passage
73
Alf Ludtke, Helden der ArbeitMuhen beim Arbeit: Zur missmutigen Loyalitat von Industriearbeitern in der DDR, in Kaelble, Kocka, and Zwahr, eds. (n. 5
above), pp. 188213.
74
Iris Czak, Spitzname Elvis: Interview mit Schorsch T., in Merkel, ed. (n. 53
above), p. 194. For a similar cultural history of the Schwalbe scooter, see Jorg Engelhardt, Schwalbe Duo Kultmobil: Vom Acker auf dem Boulevard (Berlin, 1995), pp. 7
ff.
75
This corresponds to the post-1989 literary trend toward autobiography as the new
measure of authenticity. Manfred Jager, Die Autobiographie als die Erfindung der
Wahrheit: Beispiele literarischer Selbstdarstellung nach dem Ende der DDR, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B41, no. 92 (1992): 2536. For further suggestive comments

753
far removed from the worker heroism and collective destiny of socialist realist culturethat is so striking. While it is true that this impulse to reduce
the trope of destiny from a collective to a highly personal one has characterized
many East German recollection narratives since Reunification,76 the key point
is that the narrative pivots upon the relationship between people and things.
Other examples of this kind of post-1989 subjectivized memory can be found
in the Tempolinsen catalog, which features personal recollections, product biographies, and photographs about this lost socialist consumer culture. Several
sections included reminiscences about the first time someone bought a blender,
radio, or Prasent-20 polyester suit. One notable entry was an interview with
a Frau G. in which she briefly described certain household objects that she
was about to give to the Museum for East German Everyday Culture in
Eisenhuttenstadt:
Lets start with the radio, the EAK Zwergsuper, which came from Sonneberg; it was
our first purchase with our scholarship, which meant it must have been 52 or 53. My
husband and I each had the same unit. That is Berolina, at least that is what we called
it at the time: smaller than a slab of butter. It was the first small portable radio. With
carrying case too. That was around 1970. At that time the batteriesfrom the West
cost 12 Marks each. Then there was this toaster, which is now unusable since the cord
is missing. We used it every day, then one day it simply stopped working. Even the
warranty is still there, so one can see what year it was from, 62.77
Again, the significance of this excerpt resides in its novelty as post-GDR social
history, where old things (even broken ones) live on as narrative vehicles
conveying impressions of a collapsed world of social status, fashion, comfort,
and security. Despiteor perhaps precisely because ofthe abrupt secularization of GDR artifacts, where they no longer embody the dreams of a
prosperous present and a hopeful socialist future, they now serve as repositories of private histories and sentimental reflections.
Such new consumer narratives imply a radical revision of the post-1989
East German relationship between self and society. For one thing, they reveal
about new developments in East German literature, see Julia Hell, History as Trauma,
or, Turning to the Past Once Again: Germany 1949/1989, South Atlantic Quarterly
96, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 91147.
76
Heinz Bude has commented that destiny is a category of the 90s in both West
and East Germany, where both have lost their particular cultures of common destiny
after 1989. Heinz Bude, Schicksal, in his edited Deutschland spricht: Schicksale der
Neunziger (Berlin, 1995), pp. 712. Even so, these new destiny stories are more
common in the East. Werner Kalinka, Schicksal DDR: Zwanzig Portrats von Opfern
und Tater (Berlin, 1997).
77
Andreas Ludwig, interviewer, Frau G. aus Berlin schenkt dem Museum etwas:
Interview mit Frau G., in Ludwig, ed., p. 103.

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Betts
the extent to which GDR cultural memoryfollowing the fate of its huge
industrial combines after Reunificationhas been repossessed and privatized.
But what has kept this privatization of memory from dissolvingas it has in
the Westinto subculture testimonies and affirmations of individual difference is the fact that GDR consumer culture was not based on a market cult of
differentiation. There was little variety of goods and little brand-name competition; many of the products introduced in the consumer rush of the 60s
stayed in production until 1989 with little or no change in content or form.
Regardless of how monotonous this may have been, the aesthetics of sameness
was crucial in shaping the GDRs collective memory. That is, the very lack of
product innovation and repackaging assured that these objectshowever privately experienced and rememberedwould function as transgenerational
markers of East German culture and identity. The display of these things in
specifically public venues (restaurants and nightclubs, above all) along with
the publication of these private memories as new post-GDR social history attest
to the distinctly collective aspect of this pop culture nostalgia. This is why
these socialist products have played an indispensable role since 1989 in bridging the gap between individual and society, private and public memory. While
markers of social distinction long existed within this allegedly classless societymost notably, Western goods and travel privilegesthe memories of
GDR material culture have tended to reinforce, not undermine, East German
solidarity.78 Such a formulation might seem somewhat odd, especially in light
of Charles Maiers claim that the regime survived precisely by undermining
solidarity with differential rewards such as travel and education, even by dividing up its supposedly loyal proletarian supporters into competitive work
brigades, and by rewarding snooping.79 True enough, but the point is that this
nostalgia in effect has helped reconstruct this shattered East German solidarity
after 1989. According to one of East Germanys foremost social historians,
Ina Merkel, East Germans still bond over certain standardized and massproduced commodities. Catchwords are enough for mutual recognition. Re78
Regarding markers of social distinction, see Martin Diewald, Kollektiv, Vitamin B, oder Nische? Personliche Netzwerke in der DDR as well as Martin Diewald and Heike Solga, Soziale Ungleichheiten in der DDR: Die feinen, aber deutlichen
Unterschiede am Vorabend der Wende, both in Huinink and Mayer, eds. (n. 5 above),
pp. 22260 and 261305, respectively. See also Winfried Thaa et al., eds., Gesellschaftliche Differenzierung und Legitimatsverfall des DDR-Sozialismus (Tubingen,
1992), esp. pp. 154200. This East German solidarity can be seen as a by-product of
socialist design policy wherein the capitalist cult of differentiation was rejected in favor
of what GDR design publicist Horst Redeker called the the unity of form with society;
quoted in Heinz Hirdina, Gegenstand und Utopie, in Merkel, ed., p. 50.
79
Maier (n. 3 above), p. 39.

755
member the Multimax [drill]? is enough to start a lively conversation . . . the

discourse about specific brands is enough to re-establish an East German identity.80 It is then hardly coincidental that this Ostalgie has centered less upon
the stuff of East Bloc modernism (e.g., Soviet architecture, literature, magazines, film, and political culture) than upon those goods made in the GDR.
The impulse to construct a more all-encompassing national experience and
identity from this lost consumer culture can also be noted in the way these
new stories have downplayed gendered differences within GDR material culturedifferences that were implicit in the Tempolinsen product itself and also
emerged as a key element of East German social history immediately following
the Wende.81 In an ironic twist of fate, mass-produced subpar consumer
itemsin contradistinction to state architecture, monuments, paintings, or
even literaturehave emerged as a favorite site for evoking a sense of GDR
national subjectivity amid the fallout of East German politics and intellectual
culture.
That this nostalgia would surface in the realm of consumer products is even
more perplexing given East Germanys official industrial design policy. Leaving aside the complex relationship between the East German state and industrial aesthetics over four decades,82 the GDRparticularly from the late 1950s
ongenerally espoused the virtues of functionalist design. From the states
perspective, functionalism was uniquely well suited to socialism. For one
thing, it was supposedly a postbourgeois aesthetic in which class-based ornamental styling was rejected in the name of economic rationalization and social
utility. Its emphasis on austerity, rationality, and use-value was viewed as the
perfect aesthetic expression of the larger GDR effort to create a controlled
socialist consumer culture (each according to his needs) that would not fall
victim to capitalist decadence and fetishism.83 It was in this context that unitary
forms, standardized models, material longevity, and product affordability were
Merkel, Consumer Culture in the GDR (n. 31 above), p. 296.
An excellent example is Ina Merkels . . . Und Du, Frau an der Werkbank (n. 5
above). For a far-reaching discussion of the changed power and status of women after
1989, see Boa and Wharton, eds. (n. 5 above).
82
The best overview of GDR design is Heinz Hirdina, Gestalten fur die Serie: Design
konomie
in der DDR, 19491985 (Dresden, 1988). See also Jorg Roesler, Politik, O
und Industriedesign in Ostdeutschland, Deutschland-Archiv 11 (1995): 113552.
83
Functionalism was also linked to social control. Note, e.g., the states worry during
the 1950s about the potential dangerous effects of modular furniture: if the user is free
to do what he wants with them [the components], free to arrange the constituent parts
as he pleases, the proportions of the assembled pieces will change in an uncontrollable
and artistically unacceptable manner and the underlying intellectual idea will become
unclear and elude social control. Gerhard Hillnhagen, Anbau- Aufbau- Baukasten- und
Montagemobel (Berlin, 1955), quoted in Bertsch and Hedler (n. 27 above), p. 21.
80
81

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Betts
enshrined as the hallmarks of an enlightened (that is, need-based) socialist

culture.84 But even if GDR commodity aesthetics noticeably paled in comparison to their western equivalents across the Wall, it is not true that socialist
goods were lifeless utilitarian artifacts. During the economic takeoff period of
the 1960s, for example, the state introduced more zip and color into the world
of socialist product design. This new design policy resulted from the SEDs
fear that functional socialist goods looked too ascetic and cheap.85 Nowhere
was this more apparent than in the explosion of colorful plastics in GDR
material culture at the time. Plastics were celebrated as a vital element in
modernizing and beautifying GDR everyday lifewhat Ulbricht in one
speech called an essential element of the socialist cultural revolution, especially insofar as plastics promised to help alleviate the perennial shortage of
consumer durables.86 The states new-found faith in the wonders of modern
plastics was perhaps best expressed in the widely publicized 1958 Chemical
Conference on synthetic plastics, which opened under the motto Chemicals
Provide Bread, Prosperity, and Beauty.87 Accompanying this technical change
in design was an ideological shift as well. While the 50s crusade against what
was then called the decadent formalism of cold functionalism was inseparable from the GDRs larger cultural project to forge a new postfascist cultural
identity (socialist in content, national in form) in opposition to that of the
imperial West,88 the 60s witnessed a pronounced relaxation of such antiformalist attitudes. In the sphere of design, the emphasis moved away from
preserving the German arts and crafts tradition toward styling socialist goods
with a distinctly modern face. This is where industrial designers assumed such
great cultural authority, for they were entrusted with helping engineer a new
visual vocabulary of socialist prosperity and progress. In fact, the SEDs championing of modern design went hand in hand with the regimes new belief in
the miraculous powers of technology and science to transform GDR culture
and society.89 Design was now called upon to modernize the surfaces of ev84
Merkel, Der aufhaltsame Aufbruch (n. 56 above), pp. 11, 15. This ideology
certainly informed the socialist packaging and advertising of consumer goods. Jochen
Fetzer, Gut verpackt, in Merkel, ed. (n. 53 above), pp. 10411.
85
Merkel, Consumer Culture in the GDR, p. 290.
86
Ulbricht, quoted in Horst Redeker, Chemie gibt Schonheit (Berlin, 1959), p. 14.
On plastics, see Jorg Petruschat, Take Me Plastics, in Halter, ed. (n. 27 above), pp.
10814.
87
Hirdina, Gestalten, pp. 6870.
88
Simone Barck, Das Dekadenz-Verdikt: Zur Konjunktur eines kulturpolitischen
Kampfkonzepts Ende der 1950er bis Mitte der 1960er Jahre, in Jurgen Kocka, ed.,
Historische DDR-Forschung (Berlin, 1993), pp. 32744.
89
Meuschel (n. 5 above), pp. 181220; Raymond Stokes, In Search of the Socialist
Artefact: Technology and Ideology in East Germany, 19451962, German History
15, no. 2 (1997): 22139.

757
eryday life, to reconcile the antinomies of socialist Volkskultur and industrial

civilization. In this sense, these shiny modern consumer objects played a vital
role in mediating materialism and idealism, a socialist present and a utopian
future.90
But there was another crucial factor at play that went beyond the political
marriage of style and state. For the GDRs initial rejection and subsequent
endorsement of functionalism was not merely a cold war reaction to the West;
it also pivoted upon the thorny problem of affect. Even if the discussion first
began in the 1950s, it was not until the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall
that the debate about the pathos of functionalist objects began in earnest. Having closed off its society from the West as a precondition for the development
of a new socialist modernity, the SED now sought vehicles of positive identification to help bridge the gap between people and government, economy
and culture.91 One of the key landmarks in the SEDs effort to integrate life
and Kultur was of course the 1959 Bitterfeld Conference. Here GDR artists
and writers were asked to bring the world of culture (and themselves) closer
to the lives of everyday people by providing cultural inspiration and models
of solidarity that would help bind citizen and state more effectively. Although
initially limited to the traditional spheres of cultural affectivity, namely literature and painting, the scope of the campaign was enlarged in the early 1960s.
The debate at the Fifth German Art Exposition in 1962 made it plain that the
SED now wished design to be included in the crusade to modernize socialist
culture. For was not design (so the SED reasoned) an applied art endowed
with spiritual qualities that could move and win its subjects? What is so
compelling is that the state hoped to do this by strengthening the relationship
between people and things. Designers were now summoned alongside writers
and artists to provide new sources of affective identification with the state. To
this end the East German Design Council (Zentralinstitut fur industrielle Formgestaltung, changed to Amt fur industrielle Formgestaltung in 1972) was
founded in 1963 to promote East German modern industrial design both at
home and abroad. As noted by Council Director Martin Kelm, the new socialist
designers chief task was to contribute to the development of the socialist
lifestyle and the socialist character.92 With this, design took its place within
the SEDs broader project to collectivize aesthetics, visualize progress, and
mobilize consumer passions.93 But whereas the SEDs elaborately staged state
Horst Redeker, Technik und Ornament, Form und Zweck (1962), p. 20.
Hein Koster, Schmerzliche Ankunft in die Moderne, in Merkel, ed., pp. 1012.
92
Martin Kelm, Produktgestaltung im Sozialismus (Berlin, 1971), p. 81.
93
Herfried Munkler, Das kollektive Gedachtnis der DDR, in Parteiauftrag: Ein
neues Deutschland: Bilder, Rituale und Symbole der fruhen DDR, ed. Dieter Vorsteher
(Berlin, 1996), pp. 45868.
90
91

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Betts
pageants and political demonstrations were employed to aestheticize public

spaces in a visual spectacle of community and solidarity, the industrial design
crusade aimed at transforming less ritualized social places: the workplace and
the home. It was here that design was to exert its visual power to humanize
the workworld, modernize the domestic sphere, and in turn buy emotional
loyalties.94
This perspective helps explain why this post-1989 nostalgia was so vital,
for it indicates how and why consumer goods continued to serve as the basis
of psychological investment. It is all the more decisive if we recall that the
GDRs early project to foreground the importance of housing, architecture,
and city planning as the preferred sites of socialist cultural identity markedly
shifted toward commodities and domestic spaces by the late 1950s. The founding of the GDRs flagship design journal Form und Zweck (Form and function),
the modern domestic interior magazine Kultur im Heim (Culture in the home),
the Institut fur Innengestaltung (Institute for interior design), and the East
German Design Council neatly registered this cultural shift. The deterioration
of GDR cities as well as the ever waning effect of the SEDs ritualized instrumentalization of urban space reinforced this collapse of public aesthetics. By
the 1980s design objects tooby dint of ever lowering quality and availabilityhad become emblems of economic decline and political failure. All of
this changed in 1989. Once the GDR collapsed as the basis and measure of
East German collective culture, these artifacts were resurrected as the last
remnants of a shared past. That is to say, GDR collective aestheticslike its
cultural memoryhad been privatized and domesticated. In the end, it is precisely the dreamy dimension of prized consumer durables, whose implicit
promise of the good life the state rightly feared all along, that has fired the
romantic imagination and subjective memories of GDR citizens after 1989.
Even so, it is important not to confound words and things. Surely it is quite
tempting to argue that these goods have become the last locus for reimagining
a kind of East German uncorrupted community now that GDR politics and
intellectual culture have failed to do so. The problem, however, is that this
presumes that East German material culture nostalgia is somehow universal
and uniform, or that it is the exclusive monopoly of East Germans. On the
contrary, West Germans too have busily bought up these remaining ex-GDR
objects. Of course they often do so for quite different reasons; for instance,
West Germans tend to collect not old consumer goods but, rather, more po94
Martin Kelm, GestaltungHumanisierung unserer Umwelt, Bildende Kunst 9
(1966): 45155; as well as Jurgen Peters and S. H. Bergenau, Wohngestaltung heute
und morgen, Bildende Kunst 9 (1966): 46670. A suggestive GDR analysis of the
changing historical meaning of aesthetics can be found in Lothar Kuhne, Gegenstand
ber die Historizitat des Asthetischen (Dresden, 1981).
und Raum: U

759
litical memorabilia (SED pins and flags) as the preferred emblems of their own
imagined GDR.95 Furthermore, West German merchants have been quick to
spot the economic benefit of reviving former GDR brands (especially in processed food and small objects) as a market strategy for selling to former East
Germans.96 Further complicating the picture is that it is difficult to ascertain
just how widespread and popular this East German pop culture nostalgia really
was or is. Clearly there are many manifestations of this phenomenon that
substantiate its popularity beyond the ongoing culture industry of the GDR
past; the rash of Ossi Parties in Halle, Jena, Leipzig, and Berlin during the
last few years, where party goers are required to bring old GDR trinkets for
admission, is a good example of the popular identification with GDR material
culture.97 Michael Rutschky has gone so far as to argue that this pop reinvention of the GDR past signals the genuine if belated emergence of the GDR
as culture and that its former citizens now form a real experiential and storytelling community based for the first time on free, post-SED narrative exchange and uncontrolled communication.98 Like the Owl of Minerva, East
German culture apparently takes flight only at dusk. But however much it may
seem that this outpouring of new storytelling represents a spontaneous popular
appropriation of East Germanys history (what historian Alf Ludtke has suggestively called Eigen-Sinn),99 it is still one that is quite consciously constructed. Nowhere is this more evident than in the 1998 publication of GDR
reminiscences, Die DDR wird 50 (The GDR turns fifty). Obviously, the provocative title is intended to make the point that the GDR remains alive and
well in the hearts and minds of many of its former citizens ten years after its
demise. More is at stake, however, than saying that the GDRs material past
continues to act as a cultural compass for the present. Quite revealing here is
the extent to which this compendium of dozens of brief recollections and
photographs aims to show that everyday life in the GDR was richer than
many Westerners believe and than many Easterners want to perceive.100 The
last part of the sentence is particularly startlingnamely, its suggestion that
Gries (n. 34 above), pp. 193220.
97
I thank Gabriele Linke and Pieter Lagrou for their personal accounts of such events.
98
Michael Rutschky, Wie erst jetzt die DDR entsteht, Merkur 9/10 (September/
October 1995): 85164.
99
Note Ludtkes theoretical remarks about this concept in his edited book, The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, trans.
William Templer (Princeton, N.J., 1995). Ludtke applies these ideas to various aspects
of East German history in his Helden der Arbeit essay in Kaelble, Kocka, and Zwahr,
eds. (n. 5 above), as well as in his Sprache und Herrschaft in der DDR: Einleitende
berlegungen, introducing Akten Eingaben Schaufenster, Ludtke and Becker, eds. (n.
U
5 above), pp. 1126.
100
Volker Handloik and Harald Hauswird, eds., Die DDR wird 50 (Berlin, 1998).
95
96

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Betts
the book is designed in part to contest hardened East German perceptions of

their own recollected reality. This questions not only the collective nature of
this nostalgia wave but also to what degree this trend really signaled a popularization of history arising from the broken state monopoly on East German
social history and memory. Not to say that spontaneous social expressions of
Ostalgie did not exist; the examples discussed above make this clear. But what
this latest installment of sentimental recollection does show is how this nostalgia has become a dominant post-Wall strategy of East German memory
production and cultural commemoration.
So understood, this new commemorative culture represents yet another curious turn in the historical role of East German intellectuals. For one thing, it
is notable that they have largely embraced such pop culture nostalgia. True,
they are rarely the same individuals who so vehemently condemned the consumer frenzy of the 1989 banana revolution;101 instead, these new East German intellectuals are younger scholars and critics who have been busy founding new museums or renovating old ones, organizing exhibitions, and
conducting innovative new research on East German consumer culture. At first
their interventions were generally fueled by a strong desire to challenge those
oversimplified and belittling portrayals of GDR everyday life that were massproduced in the Western (and above all West German) media. On this score,
Eisenhuttenstadts Museum for East German Everyday Culture doubtless functions as a counternarrative to the one advanced in the vitrines of Bonns Haus
der Geschichte. Yet the significance of these new ex-GDR cultural institutions
goes far beyond just celebrating the linkages between material culture and
national identity in East Germanys past and present. For if it is true that 1989
dramatically exposed the awkward distance between the intellectuals of the
GDR and the people, this post-1989 commemoration wave of East German
material culture has effectively helped bridge the former chasm. No finger
wagging or scolding from intellectuals this time, nor any prescriptions of cultural enlightenment and consumer asceticism. In part this is because East German intellectuals have lost their cold war soapboxes, subsidized venues, and
captive audiences. But it can also be attributed to the sudden collapse of the
GDR present and future, so that only the pastand a material one at that
now plays host to wistful rumination. If only for this reason, this new group
of post-Wende intellectuals may ironically be closer to the concerns and sentiments of the people in their affirmative attitude toward the GDRs former
industrial Volkskultur than intellectuals ever were before the dismantling of
the Wall. Again, the Die DDR wird 50 volume is instructive: not only do highly
101
G. Korff, Rote Fahnen und Bananen: Notizen zur politischen Symbolik im Prozess der Vereinigung von DDR und BRD, Schweizerisches Archiv fur Volkskunde 86,
no. 3/4 (1990): 13060.

761
personal accounts and photographs of the GDRs former everyday culture

broilers, noodle soup mix, and homemade sweaterscommingle comfortably
with impressionistic inventories of the days of yore but in addition older critics
of consumerism like Stephan Heym are now included among the new testimonies of a post-Kultur GDR past.
But to characterize this Ostalgie as the last stand of the old GDRs antiWestern resistance is rather misleading. For one thing, we must not forget that
much of this new romance with the material past arose as a reaction against
the old GDR itself. Above all, it pointed up the bankruptcy of East German
politics, socialist economics, and the culture of asceticism in the eyes of its
former citizens. Rather than cherished icons of national affluence and equitable
state policy, these memoried goods are perceived as markers of anti-SED solidarity, collective privation, and partially met private desire. But if this material
culture nostalgia represents a rejection of the old GDR, it also reveals that the
seemingly special construction of East German identity shared a great deal
with the Wests construction of itself. Certainly it can be argued that such
sentimentalism has enjoyed little corresponding expression in the other exEast Bloc countries precisely because the GDR (both before and after 1989)
was more enamored of Western consumer dreams than its socialist brethren
were. The constant pressure of West German consumer culture (whether in the
form of actual goods or media images) as the universal yardstick of progress
and prosperity, the disappointing economic realities and colonizing effects of
Reunification, and the GDRs postfascist rejection of romantic nationalism as
the polestar of pre-1989 political resistance and post-1989 national collectivity
largely account for the GDRs uniqueness. That is to say, East Germanys
political destiny, too, was built with the very mortar of Western social politics
for the last half centurynamely, consumerism as political legitimacy. The
relevance of this concept for the GDR is all the more striking once we recall
that it was not during the great economic takeoff of the post-1945 period when
the West in effect erased the distinctions between politics and economics,
government credibility and material satisfaction, consumerism and citizenship.
As recent scholarship demonstrates, the Wests political theology of collective
happiness was really a child of the Great Depression. It was first during this
systemic financial crisis that political idealism was explicitly wedded to economic prosperity. Certainly this was the case for the United States, France,
Great Britain, and even Nazi Germany, and it was equally true for the Federal
Republic in the 1950s.102 While this ideology obviously shaped East Bloc
102
James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution,
18501940 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994); Charles McGovern, Consumption and Citizenship in the United States, 19001940; and Victoria DeGrazia, Changing Consumption Regimes in Europe, 19301970: Comparative Perspectives on the Distribution

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Betts
politics as well, it was nowhere more acute than in the GDR. Material dreams
of the good life prompted the 1953 uprising, the 1961 construction of the Wall,
and, of course, its dramatic dismantling a generation later. Indeed, it was the
consumer dreams born amid pain and privationlike that in the West during
the depressionthat eventually crowded out more traditional socialist concerns. One Ministry of State Security report on popular attitudes toward the
economy drafted in June 1989 conveyed this deadly development on the eve
of collapse. With great resignation, it conceded that the quantity and quality
of consumer goods in the GDR is increasingly becoming the basic criterion
for the assessment of the attractiveness of socialism in comparison to capitalism.103 That 1989 reports of Erich Honeckers petit-bourgeois consumer lifestyle escalated into such a highly charged scandal of Party decadence (WandlitzEast Berlins special government residential quarterwas often referred
to as Volvograd already by the early 1980s) dramatically illustrated the extent
to which consumer frustration and envy animated East German cultural consciousness. Surely the politicization of economics and consumer goods
which intensified as political idealism fadedwas hardly special to East Germany; what is remarkable about the GDR is how these same begrudged objects
of disaffection became the common vessels of warmed-over cultural memory
and political subjectivity a few short years later.
For all of these reasons, the rich afterlife of these charged relics raises difficult questions about their historical evaluation. Given the dramatic liquidation
of East German state and society, it is perhaps no accident that the debate
about the significance of these items has largely centered on the role and
mission of the museum. The recent foundation of the Museum for East German Everyday Culture in Eisenhuttenstadtof which the Tempo-Lentils
and P2 exposition was a key installationis at the heart of this discussion.
No doubt some of this is linked to the age-old museum problem of selection
and representation, mediating the visible and invisible. But in the East German
case, the more profound issue has to do with the radically changed status of
the objects themselves. Things that were still in heavy demand and production
just months prior to the Wendethe Trabant and Wartburg automobiles are
perhaps the best exampleswere suddenly robbed of their use-value status
and immediately transformed into obsolete artifacts. Their fate was to end up
at either the landfill, the flea market, or the museum, places thatas some
Problem; and Lizabeth Cohen, The New Deal State and the Making of Citizen Consumers, all in Strasser, McGovern, and Judt, eds. (n. 31 above), pp. 3758, 5984,
and 11125, respectively. For perceptive accounts of the West German case, Michael
Wildt, Vom kleinen Wohlstand: Eine Konsumgeschichte der funfziger Jahre (Frankfurt,
1994); and Carter (n. 71 above), esp. pp. 10970.
103
Quoted in Zatlin (n. 69 above).

763
notedwere sometimes not so easy to distinguish. To be sure, the sudden

devaluation of East German goods reflects the larger quandary of how to assess
the whole GDR itself. For if they are to be salvaged as telling trinkets of the
GDR, then what are they supposed to signify? How can any museum manage
to represent the socialist consumer objects complex status as state industrial
policy, cultural commodity, and repository of cheated dreams before 1989,
longing and loss afterward? How can a museum display the manner in which
objectsnot unlike East Germanys intellectual cultureultimately performed a stabilizing function in legitimating the GDR to its own people?104
Further, is it fair to reduce these objects to strictly visual criteria when it was
precisely the specific antidesign functionalism (and anticapitalist visual culture) that shaped these things in the first place?105 These questions are all
extremely difficult, not least because what is at stake is the complicated status
of East German consumer culture itself. If nothing else, the debate clearly
points out that GDR social history cannot be reduced simply to the Stasi state,
political despair, and/or economic malfeasance. That a good deal of this postWende discussion has focused on its long-maligned consumer society (whether
this attitude originates from East or West Germans, intellectuals or ordinary
people) reveals much about the perceived relationship between new past and
old. And even if there is wide-ranging disagreement about how best to recollect
this GDR material culture, there is little dispute that such consumer socialism
remains fundamental to the meaning and future of GDR history.106
No matter how it is represented, it is undeniable that the world of material
culture has maintained a remarkable cultural shelf life in the dusk of East
German history. But to contend that it simply signals the ironic commercialization of East German memory and culturewhere the tragedy of East German communism has turned into the farce of fire-sale inventoriesultimately
tells us little. Equally inadequate are facile explanations about the triumph of
capitalism over communism, or even about the sudden psychological fallout
from encountering real existing capitalism. For at the heart of this collapse
of GDR socialism were the twin yet irreconcilable aspects of Marxist thought
itself: the materialization of self, society, and history on the one hand, and the
ideology of progress on the other. Marx was right to note in the first part of
Capital that the commodity remains the center of modern economic and social
life. Socialismfor all of its social engineeringnever altered that. The East
104
Lamenting the ultimately noncritical nature and stabilizing effect of GDR literary
and intellectual culture informs many of the interviews printed in von Hallberg, esp.
pts. 3 and 4. Selle (n. 29 above), p. 89.
105
Merkel, . . . Und Du, Frau an der Werkbank (n. 5 above), p. 7.
106
Gerd Kuhn and Andreas Ludwig, eds., Alltag und soziales Gedachtnis: Die DDR
Objektkultur und ihre Musealisierung (Hamburg, 1997); and Jelich and Faulenbach,
eds. (n. 26 above).

764
Betts
Bloc revolutions have shown that even the perceived absence of consumer
goods was itself a revolutionary social force. Little wonder, then, that many
argue that the revolution of 1989 was essentially a materialist one, even if it
did supposedly disprove Marxist social theory in being the making less of
disgruntled producers than of dissatisfied consumers. Certainly the SED understood the political power of consumerism all too well in the wake of the
1953 worker uprising in Berlin and the 1961 construction of the Wall, when
political acquiescence was partly bought with consumer articles. And faced
with increasing shortages of goods during the 1980s, the SED relented and
allowed the reception of West German television programs for similar political
ends, betraying the extent to which the state had learned to use Western
culture to pacify its own citizens.107 Yet the socialist emphasis upon material
production and the gradual shrinkage of its time horizon (the collapse of any
revolutionary future and the empty ritualization of its heroic collective past)
into a concrete and stagnant present ultimately doomed the regime. Simply
put, materialism had replaced idealism. In the words of the psychiatrist Maaz:
at no time could Socialism as It Really Existed produce credible and convincing values that extended beyond the mundane achievement-oriented materialism. In the always mortifying comparison with the superior and wealthier
West Germans, the East Germans were even crazier for material things.
Chronic frustration and envy surely played a decisive role in that.108 Even exNew Forum leader Barbel Bohley was forced to concur: it took a long time
to realize that the people here were so materialistic, that people were more
interested in things than ideals.109 However much these writers may have
underestimated the idealism that undergirded East German society until the
early 1970s, as well as the deeply felt importance of immaterial values such
as family, leisure, and health,110 they do confirm that materialism accounted
for much of the political energy of 1989. Historian Ina Merkel perhaps said it
best when she remarked that the struggle between the systems did not take
the form of armed conflict, but was rather shifted to the marketplace. And it
Borneman (n. 23 above), p. 137.

Maaz, Behind the Wall (n. 31 above), pp. 8586. He cynically concluded that
such materialistic attitudes even colored the relationship between East and West Germans: Some West Germans raved about the warmth with which they were received
by us when they came on visits. This may have been an indication that some relationships were even more difficult or more superficial in the West. But in effect the hospitality and superficial friendliness to the visitors was most engendered by East German
greed for material things (p. 94).
109
Quoted in Fischer (n. 8 above), p. 154.
110
Roland Habich and Eckhard Priller, Soziale Lage und subjektives Wohlbefinden
in der ehemaligen DDR, in Abbruch und Aufbruch, ed. Michael Thomas (Berlin,
1992), pp. 23958.
107
108

765
was here, in the sphere of consumerism, where the battle was won.111 The
rise of such pop culture Ostalgie proves that those things that the state had
supposedly overcome in the name of the great socialist experimentsubjective fancy, individual luxury, commodity fetishism, and irrational consumer
desireeventually returned as its archnemeses. The irony is that the people
apparently took these dreams of a better and more prosperous world more
seriously than the state ever expected, so much so that the government was
ultimately sued for false advertising. In this way, Nietzscheand not Marx
may have the last word. For here was a situation in which the GDR never
philosophized with a hammer in doing away with the middle-class metaphysics of materialism. Despite everything else, the idols of the marketplace
were never smashed. On the contrary, they have continued to exert their occult
powers through the twilight of GDR memory, serving as the strange last talismans of secular transcendence and postrevolutionary time.
111


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The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and Material Culture

Author(s): Paul Betts

This content downloaded from 134.100.172.71 on Fri, 10 Apr 2015 06:40:00 AM

The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and

This content downloaded from 134.100.172.71 on Fri, 10 Apr 2015 06:40:00 AM

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