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The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and Material CultureAuthor(s): Paul BettsSource: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 72, No. 3 (September 2000), pp. 731-765Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/316046.
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[The Journal of Modern History 72 (September 2000): 731765] 2000 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2000/7203-0004$02.00All rights reserved.
The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory andMaterial Culture*
Paul BettsUniversity of Sussex
By now it is commonplace to assert that the events of 1989 have radically andirreversibly 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 Czecho-
slovakia, Germany enjoyed a preeminent place in this historical drama. Not
only did the sudden dismantling of the cold wars most potent political monu-
ment 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 inter-
national anxiety about its bullish political future predictably invited widespread
* Research funding for this article was made possible by the University of NorthCarolinas Junior Faculty Summer Research Grant Program and the Southern RegionalEducation Board. Thanks also go to Lyman Johnson and the two JMHreaders for theirconstructive 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 theSoviet 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).
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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 re-
newed 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 Leip-
zig to closed-door Bundesbank deliberations, the study of these sea changeshas blossomed into a vigorous cottage industry of transatlantic scholarship.
Over the course of the decade the cast of storytellers has changed dramat-
ically. 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 percep-
tively reinterpreted the well-worn cold war cliches of East German architec-
ture, painting, and/or literature; they have also set their sights on interrogatingthe 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 toGerman Unification(New York, 1992); and Robin Blackburn, ed.,After the Fall: TheFailure of Communism(London, 1991).
3 Among the most important contributions are Charles Maier,Dissolution: The Crisisof Communism and the Collapse of the East German State (Princeton, N.J., 1997);Philip Zelikov and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: AStudy in Statecraft(Cambridge, 1995); Heinrich Potthoff,Die Koalition der Vernunft:
Deutschlandpolitik in den 80er Jahren(Munich, 1995); Konrad Jarausch,The Rush toGerman Unity (New York, 1994); Michael Huelshoff, Andrei Markovits, and SimonReich, eds., From the Bundesrepublik to Deutschland: German Politics after Reunifi-cation(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 Ger-many(Washington, D.C., 1992); and Gert-Joachim Glasner and Ian Wallace, eds.,TheGerman Revolution of 1989: Causes and Consequences (Oxford, 1992). Journalisticaccounts 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); Tim-othy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern (New York, 1990); and Klaus Hartung, Neun-
zehnhundertneunundachtzig(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
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visible of all the revisionists thus far have been the social historians, anthro-
pologists, 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 so-
called 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 existingsocialism.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 Ostalgietoward
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 zwischenMacht und Ohnmacht: Architektur und Staedtebau in der DDR (Berlin, 1991); MartinDamus,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,Post-fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History and the Literature of East Germany(Dur-ham, N.C., 1997); Arthur Williams et al., German Literature at a Time of Change,19891990: German Unity and Identity in Literary Perspective (Bern, 1991);LawrenceMcFalls, Communisms Collapse, Democracys Demise? The Cultural Context andConsequences of the East German Revolution (New York, 1995); Manfred Jager, Kulturund Politik in der DDR, 19451990 (Cologne, 1995); and Friederike Eigler and PeterPfeiffer, eds.,Cultural Transformations in the New Germany (Columbia, S.C., 1993).
5 Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended: Transition and Identity in the GermanBorderland(Berkeley, 1999); Wolfgang Engler, Die Ostdeutschen: Kunde von EinemVerlorenen Land(Berlin, 1999); Konrad Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience:Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York, 1999); Alf Ludtke and PeterBecker, eds.,Akten, Eingaben, Schaufenster: Die Erkundungen zu Herrschaft und All-tag (Berlin, 1997); Johannes Huinink and Karl Ulrich Mayer, eds., Kollektiv und Ei-gensinn: Lebenslaufe in der DDR und danach(Berlin, 1995); Mary Fulbrook,Anatomyof a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 19491989 (Oxford, 1995); Hartmut Kaelble, Juer-
gen Kocka, and Hartmut Zwahr, eds., Sozialgeschichte der DDR (Stuttgart, 1994);Elizabeth Boa and Janet Wharton, eds., Women and the Wende: Social Effects andCultural Reflections of the German Unification Process (Amsterdam, 1994); ArminMitter and Stefan Wolle, Untergang auf Raten: Unbekannte Kapitel der DDR-Ge-schichte (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 den50er Jahren (Berlin, 1990); and Hans-Joachim Maaz, Der Gefuhlsstau: Ein Psycho-gramm 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, HorstBecker, and Walter Ruhland, Zwischen Angst und Aufbruch: Das Lebensgefuhl der
Deutschen in Ost und West nach der Wiedervereinigung(Dusseldorf, 1992).
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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 per-
ceived as a genuine consumer culture. Most observers (particularly those in
the West) tended to characterize it as essentially a culture of privation, eco-nomic 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 thechanging nature of East German historical consciousness since that revolu-
tionary 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 absorp-
tion what East German detractors often called Kohl-onization that 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 inspeaking of this banana republic: the population that, after years of subordinationand escape, had summoned up its strength and taken its fate into its own hands, andthat only yesterday appeared to strive nobly toward a radiant future, was transformedinto a horde of the possessed who, pressed back-to-stomach, mobbed [the West Germandepartment stores] Hertie and Bilka in pursuit of the golden trinket. Stephan Heym,Aschenmittwoch in der DDR, Der Spiegel(December 4, 1989).
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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 an-
nexation forever severed East German history and memory.9
To this one might interject that such an uncoupling of history and memoryis hardly specific to post-1989 East German culture. After all, it is this very
disjunction that has earmarked the postmodern turn in Western academic think-
ing 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 de-
scribe 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 memoryare by no means coterminous. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ex-
USSR, 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 post-
Soviet 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 nar-
ratives. Perhaps this is the most salutary effect of its vaunted heritage of an-
tifascism, 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 GDRto sidestep any Nazi association and/or Holocaust accountabilityits Party
9 Jonathan Osmond, The End of the GDR: Revolution and Voluntary Annexation,inGerman History since 1800, ed. Mary Fulbrook (London, 1997), pp. 45472.
10 See, e.g., Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capi-talism(Durham, N.C., 1992); and Andrew Ross, ed., Universal Abandon? The Politicsof Postmodernism(Minneapolis, 1988).
11 Matthew Kraljic, ed.,The Breakup of Communism: The Soviet Union and EasternEurope (New York, 1993); and Stephen White, ed., The Politics of Transition (Cam-bridge, 1993).
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history always held that because communists were victimized by the fascist
capitalists they were by no means culpable for Nazi crimes 12it was none-
theless effective in short-circuiting dangerous revanchist fantasies. This anti-
nationalist thrust was also related to the legacy of international socialism. Un-
inspiring 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 cam-paign in the late 1970s to commemorate German national historyreinvent-
ing, for example, Frederick the Great, Goethe, and Beethoven as protosocial-
istsin 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 pan-
European 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 nation-
alist sentiment did animate the post-1989 phase was less about the German
political past than about its promising economic futurewhat philosopherJurgen 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
dividingWessisandOssis.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 degen-
erated 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, seeMichael 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; KarlOtto 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
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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 nation-
alism ought not remain the exclusive property of the Radical Right and thatGerman patriotism could and should find new enlightened expression.19
However much the effort to construct a new German identity has been pre-
dictably (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
convertingKulturinto 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 Kulturnationarose as compen-
sation for political disunity in the decades preceding Germanys 1871 Unifi-cation 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(October 22, 1993); and Ulrich Overmann, Zwei Staaten oder Einheit: Der dritteWeg als Fortsetzung des deutschen Sonderweges,Merkur492 (February 1990): 91106. For the conservatives, see Karl-Heinz Bohrer, Why We Are Not a Nation andWhy We Become One, in James and Stone, eds., pp. 6070; Botho Strauss, An-schwellender Bockgesang, Der Spiegel (February 8, 1993); and Heimo Schwilk andUlrich Schacht, eds., Die selbstbewusste Nation (Berlin, 1996).
20 Konrad Jarausch, Normalization or Renationalization? On Reinterpreting the Ger-man Past, in Rewriting the German Past: History and Identity in the New Germany,ed. Richard Alter and Peter Monteath (N.J., 1997), pp. 2339.
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image making. Instead, it has devoted its energies to something else altogether,
namely, the historical origins and development of this apparently insurmount-
able German-German difference.21
In an atmosphere in which inter-German cultural difference and not same-
ness dominate postcold war historiography, the changes have been particu-
larly pronounced in the ex-GDR. This is more than merely saying that the
GDR pastlike its currency and political culturehas suddenly become in-stant 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 car-
petbaggers, whose historiographical perspectives have ranged from post-1989
exoticism about the wild, wild East to blatant exercises in political nostal-
gia.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 Mo-
sess 198990 series of photographic East German portraits was praised for
chronicling the people as the subject of history far removed from the theo-retical 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 Kless-mann and Georg Wagner, Das gespaltete Land: Leben in Deutschland, 19451990(Munich, 1993); Wolfgang Kaschuba and Ute Mohrmann, eds., Blick-Wechsel Ost-West: Beobachtungen zur Alltagsgeschichte in Ost- und Westdeutschland(Tubingen,1992); and the special Deutschland, Deutschland issue ofKursbuch109 (September1992).
22 It should be noted that this nostalgia has not been confined to East Germany. Forsentimental 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); DirkPhilipsen,We Were the People: Voices from East Germanys Revolutionary Autumn of1989 (Durham, N.C., 1993); Lutz Niethammer, Alexander von Plato, and DorotheeWierling, eds.,Die eigene Volkserfahrung: Eine Archaologie des Lebens in der Indus-trieprovinz der DDR(Berlin, 1991); John Borneman, After the Wall: East Meets Westin the New Berlin(New York, 1991); and Hans Mayer,Der Turm von Babel: Erinne-rung an eine Deutsche Demokratische Republik(Frankfurt, 1991).
24 See Christoph Stozls Vorwort to Stephan MosessAbschied und Anfang: Ost-deutsche Portrats, 1989 1990(Ostfildern bei Stuttgart, 1991), pp. 7 8.
25 One observer even argued that the new attention toward GDR everyday culture
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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 per-
manent exhibition. Other more popular manifestations exist as well in which
the design of consumer durables functions as visual shorthand for German-
German 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 an-
timodern 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,translatedin English asSED: Stunning Eastern Design.In this case, two West Germans
journeyed to the GDR a few months before the opening of the Wall to under-
take what they called a lightning archaeological excursion. Having collected
carloads of East German everyday objects ranging from soap labels to con-
doms, they exhibited these real-existing commodities within the gray every-
day 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 wasfinally taken seriously. Andreas Ludwig, Vorwort, in his Tempolinsen und P2: All-tagskultur der DDR (Berlin, 1996), p. 9.
26 Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Zeitraume, Konzept, Ar-chitektur, Ausstellungen (Berlin, 1994); and Hermann Schafer, Alltagsgeschichte imgeteilten Deutschland: Zur Konzeption und Darstellung im Haus der Geschichte derBundesrepublik Deutschland, in Probleme der Musealisierung der doppelten Nach-kriegsgeschichte, ed. Bernd Faulenbach and Franz-Josef Jelich (Essen, 1993), pp. 4754.
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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 isDaseinwas 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 eventualsuccession of capitalism was apparently disproved by the 1989 East Bloc rev-
olutions; 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. Mo-
dernity, 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 cul-
tural life as less materialistic and more noble in its austere simplicity than that
of the West,29 the pseudoanthropology of modernity/unmodernity still domi-
nates 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 theexhibition made a similar point in remarking: Spott und Schadenfreude bleiben demBesucher allerdings schnell in Halse stekken. Die gnadelose Harte und Widerspenstig-keit der Objekte erinnern an Hans Magnus Enzenbergers Bonmot, der reale existieren-den Sozialismus sei das hochste Stadium der Unterentwicklung. Quoted in MichaelAndritzky, Karge Charme und bunte Uppigkeit: Ein Ost-West Vergleich, in Vom
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 ofcapital, not to have to produce, sell, consume, take care of things ASAP: that too, isthe freedom of the East . . . and this different quality of time, this half-sleep time,practically undisturbed by occasional campaigns to raise workers productivity, thisEast-Time, according to the current exchange rate, is worth only an eighth of West-
Time. Because it is worthless, it can be passed by unused, unobserved, unnoticed, justlike childrens time, which is not yet measured in hours and minutes, but rather bywhat chances and moods happen to produce in the way of experience . . . the East existsin a nature preserve for scientific and technical backwardness (Martin Ahrends, TheGreat Waiting, or The Freedom of the East: An Obituary for Life in Sleeping BeautysCastle, in James and Stone, eds. [n. 2 above], pp. 15860).
29 Gert Selle, Die verlorene Unschuld der Armut: Uber das Verschwinden einerKulturdifferenz, in Halter, ed., pp. 5466.
30 Ilja Srubar, War der reale Sozialismus modern? Versuch einer strukturellen Bes-timmung,Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Soziopsychologie 43 (1991): 41532.See also Zbiegniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Commu-nism in the Twentieth Century(New York, 1989).
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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 canswere 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 never-
ending 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 hier-
archy 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 frus-
tration. Numerous eyewitness reports confirmed this view by dramatizing East
Germanys initial frenzied acquisition of Western things along with the side-walk 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 embar-
rassment, 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 theStruggle for Antimodernity Was Lost on the Battleground of Consumer Culture, inGetting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the TwentiethCentury,ed. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt [Cambridge, 1998],p. 284). See also Reinhard Koch, Alltagswissen versus Ideologie? Theoretische undempirische Beitrage zu einer Alltagsphanomenologie der DDR, Politische Vierteljah-resschrift20 (1989): 11415.
32 Der Spiegel43:50 (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 Zigaret-tenmarke, die hier verschwindet, ein Stuck meiner Identitat. So seltsam das klingen
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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 inten-
sified German-German differences and heightened the old East German self-
perception of being second-class citizens. On the other hand, East German
nostalgia was also fueled by the actual consumption of Western goods. Oncepurchased, many of these coveted articles lost their nimbus of symbolic capital
and political magic and returned to the disenchanted world of hyped ex-
change-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 re-
placed 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 pro-
posal for a Disneyesque East German theme parkaptly titled Ossi Parkin 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 consum-
ers 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 Ampel-
mannchen (the little traffic light figure that adorned GDR city crosswalks).36
mag, aber es hat einen realen Hintergrund: Durch die Art und Weise des Beitritteswurde nicht nur das zerruttete System der DDR beseitigt, sondern wurden auch Bio-graphien, Identitaten und Hoffnungen ausgeloscht. Bernd Lindner and Ralph Grune-berger, eds.,Demonteure: Biographien des Leipziger Herbst(Bielefeld, 1992), p. 241,
quoted in Rainer Gries, Der Geschmack der Heimat: Hurra, ich lebe noch!: Bausteinezu 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(Ber-lin, 1995); Gudrun Brandenburg, Die Treue kommt oft zu spat: Was nach der Wendeauf dem Sperrmull landete, is heute Objekt nostalgischer Begierden, Berliner Mor-genpost(May 7, 1993); Anke Westphal, Mein wunderbarer Plattenbau, Hoppla, WirLeben Noch,Die Tageszeitung(August 25, 1995), pp. 15 16; Heide Riedel, ed.,Mituns zieht die neue Zeit: 40 Jahre DDR-Medien (Berlin, 1994); and Andreas Michaelis,ed.,DDR Souvenirs (Cologne, 1994); and Gries, pp. 193 214.
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That much of this was understood as a desperate gesture of cultural self-
defense 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 whatex New 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 soli-
darity 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 OnePeople 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 Trauer-
spielof serialized Stasi disclosures about state corruption, widespread denun-
ciation, and personal betrayal effectively blocked any real positive identifica-
tion 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 de-
scribed as a niche society composed of small circles of trusted friends and
family.41 The dramatic knowledge that these East German structures of socia-
37 Anna Mulrine, Icon Faces a Crossroads, U.S. News and World Report(February2, 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(Frank-furt, 1993).
41 Gunther Gaus, Wo Deutschland liegt: Eine Ortbestimmung (Munich, 1986); andKatharina Belwe, Zwischenmenschliche Entfremdung in der DDR, in Die DDR inder Ara Honecker,ed. Gert-Joachim Glassner (Cologne, 1988), pp. 499 513.
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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 intellec-
tuals unlike their East Bloc brethren played no leading role in the recon-
struction 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 socialistreform as the best political medicine. Noble as their struggle to reconstruct
civil society instead of the nation-state may have been, its message went un-
heeded among the citizenry. The isolation of the intellectuals from the people
was made quite plain by the tabloidBild-Zeitungon 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 Volkwas 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, Intellec-tuals, Socialism and Dissent: The East German Opposition and Its Legacy (Minne-apolis, 1995); and Andreas Huyssen, After the Wall: The Failure of German Intellec-tuals, in his Twilight Memories(New York, 1995), pp. 3766.
44 This sentiment found expression across the political spectrum from the West Ger-man right to East German radical left. See, e.g., Joachim Fests 1989 essay, TheSilenceof the Clerks, in James and Stone, eds. (n. 2 above), pp. 5256; and the numerouslaments by East German intellectuals in Philipsen, esp. chap. 8.
45 Bild-Zeitung(November 9, 1990), quoted in von Hallberg, ed., p. 5.
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East German Memory and Material Culture 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 nation-
alism,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, giventhat theylike the state itselfwere theoretically the exponents of the belea-
gueredVolk.
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 intellectuals particularly poets, play-
wrights, and philosophersplayed an instrumental role in the cultural con-
struction of the German nation during the decades preceding German unifi-
cation.49 It was first under Bismarck (albeit only with limited success) and
particularly under Hitler (due above all to the violent exclusion of dissent) thatGerman 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 Reunifi-
cation. 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
46 Torpey, pp. ixxiv.47 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 GermanUnification 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 Tor-pey, p. 184.
49 Tony Judt, 1989: The End of Which European Era? Daedalus123, no. 3 (Sum-mer 1994): 120.
50 Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone ofOccupation, 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 thispoint.
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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-pro-
file controversies surrounding Christa Wolf and Sascha Anderson only deep-
ened this widespread sense of betrayal and disillusionment. This was all the
more disheartening insofar as intellectuals were long regarded both inside andoutside East Germany as the very embodiment of what little pluralism and
counterculture existed before 1989. So what began as a healthy and long-
overdue 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 noncapi-
talist social solidarity that helped convert material culture into a new locus of
historical romanticism. Some may find this quite paradoxical, given the on-
going 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-Spieland Ratsel
DDR: DDR Ratselare two popular examples) based on the forlorn iconogra-
phica socialisticaof 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 tel-
eology.
But it is not as if the whole GDR consumer past has been awash in thewarm 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 Geschichteder Gesellschaft der DDR, in Kaelble, Kocka, and Zwahr, eds. (n. 5 above), p. 110.
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East German Memory and Material Culture 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 po-
litical system was stabilized in this manner, the SED concentrated on build-
ing a novel socialist industrial culture. The very title of one recent exhibitiondedicated to recalling this decisive epoch Wunderwirtschaft, 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 Ger-
many 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-importantindustrial 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 thelast vestiges of its postwar rationing society and embark on its consumer
53 Ina Merkel, ed., Wunderwirtschaft: DDR-Konsumkultur in den 60er Jahren (Co-logne, 1996).
54 Even so, rationing for meat, eggs, and butter was provisionally reintroduced in1962. 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).
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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 ideo-
logical problem of modern consumerism itself. The issue was not simply the
validity of dumping various consumer products on GDR society as the de-
served fruit of socialist labor. The question was, rather, How could consum-
erism 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 aboutthe long-term economic and political consequences of not investing in the
consumer goods sector: due to this, West Germany can constantly apply po-
litical 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 de-
manded 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 Western-
oriented youth culture. Gerlinde Irmscher, Der Westen im Ost-Alltag: DDR Jugend-kultur in den sechziger Jahren, in Merkel, ed., pp. 18593; and Dorothee Wierling,Die Jugend als innerer Feind: Konflikte in der Erziehungsdiktatur der 60er Jahre, inKaelble, Kocka, und Zwahr, eds., pp. 40425.
60 Both the excerpt from the Ulbricht letter to Khrushchev of January 18, 1961, andthe commentary are quoted in Kopstein, p. 44.
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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 disaf-
fection, 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,Cen-
trum,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 im-
ages 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 intro-
duction 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 magazinesand 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 consid-
ered luxury itemssuch as washing machines and refrigeratorsbecame in-
creasingly 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 every-
day life seemed to bespeak the future viability of the GDRs consumer so-
cialism.
61 Quoted in Annette Kaminsky, Keine Zeit verlaufenbeim Versandhaus kau-fen, in Merkel, ed., pp. 13233.
62 Katherine Pence, Schaufenster des sozialistischen Konsums: Texte der ost-deutschen Consumer Culture, in Ludtke and Becker, eds. (n. 5 above), pp. 91 118.
63 For a good discussion of the SEDs price politics, see Andre Steiner, ZwischenFrustration und Verschwendung, in Merkel, ed. (n. 53 above), pp. 2136.
64 For a good account of consumer complaints, see Felix Muhlberg, Wenn die Faustauf den Tisch schlagt . . . Eingaben als Strategie zur Bewatigung des Alltags, in Mer-kel, ed., pp. 17584.
65 By 1967, 35 percent of East Germans owned refrigerators, while 46 percent hadwashing machines. Gerlinde Irmscher, Arbeitsfrei mit Kusschen drauf, in Merkel,ed., p. 47.
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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 sub-par 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 mid-
1970s it was plain that the states effort to marry socialism and modern con-
sumerism 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 revo-
lutionized 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 lia-
bility. Such dissatisfaction laced Lutz Niethammers oral history of older work-
ers in the GDRs industrial provinces: their principal complaint was the never-changing 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 re-
sentment, not least because it flouted socialist ideals of social equality.70 Theeconomic 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
66 Merkel, ed., p. 12.67 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.
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East German Memory and Material Culture 751
East Bloc) appeared to many as less the inheritor of the earth than an unre-
alizable 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 econ-
omy 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 owneconomic 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 undP2, 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 dou-
ble 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 proto-
type 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 modern-
ization 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 undP2 exhibition is the very
form of remembrance. Unlike conventional museum displays of material ob-
71 The same went for East Germanys hygiene and beauty industry. For a sharpanalysis, see Simone Tippach-Schneider, Wie Bist Du Weiss? U ber die widerspen-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 Alltagslebenin der DDR: Vom Zusammenbruch des Dritten Reiches bis zur Wende in Kommernand the 1998 Gluck im Osten show at the Kulturbrauerei in Berlin.
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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 individ-
ual socialist consumer who occupied center stage. Lest there be any misun-derstanding, I do not mean to imply that the self-understanding of East German
identity suddenly changed from producer to consumer; the numerous oral his-
tory projects since 1989 have made it clear that the identity and sense of self-
worth 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 ex-
ample, the following post-1989 recollection from the Wunderwirtschaftcata-
log:
I had to save a long time for the motorcycle. The thing cost me 1900 Marks at thetime. But it was worth it. It was the absolute best! A 250 Pannonia with benchseat andradio. While I was braking my mother always slid off, something whichI mustadmitalways amused me. I still remember that I constantly drove to see my futurewife in her village. Nobody had a motorbike there, which made mine a kind of statussymbol. I even had additional footrests installed for my small son. After that, the threeof us drove everywhere together! The people in the village thought that we were crazyto drive around like that with a child on board. My in-laws were actually rather hands-off and never interfered in our affairs or told us what to docompletely unlike mymother. She just didnt understand this kind of life, it was all so new. In any case I hadthis 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 lotof 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 Arbeit Muhen beim Arbeit: Zur missmutigen Loy-alitat von Industriearbeitern in der DDR, in Kaelble, Kocka, and Zwahr, eds. (n. 5above), pp. 188213.
74 Iris Czak, Spitzname Elvis: Interview mit Schorsch T., in Merkel, ed. (n. 53above), p. 194. For a similar cultural history of the Schwalbe scooter, see Jorg Engel-hardt, Schwalbe Duo Kultmobil: Vom Acker auf dem Boulevard(Berlin, 1995), pp. 7ff.
75 This corresponds to the post-1989 literary trend toward autobiography as the newmeasure of authenticity. Manfred Jager, Die Autobiographie als die Erfindung derWahrheit: Beispiele literarischer Selbstdarstellung nach dem Ende der DDR,Aus Pol-itik und Zeitgeschichte B41, no. 92 (1992): 2536. For further suggestive comments
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East German Memory and Material Culture 753
far removed from the worker heroism and collective destiny of socialist re-
alist 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 Tempolinsencatalog, which features personal recollections, product bi-ographies, 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 wasour first purchase with our scholarship, which meant it must have been 52 or 53. Myhusband and I each had the same unit. That is Berolina, at least that is what we calledit at the time: smaller than a slab of butter. It was the first small portable radio. Withcarrying case too. That was around 1970. At that time the batteriesfrom the Westcost 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 thewarranty 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 secu-
larization of GDR artifacts, where they no longer embody the dreams of a
prosperous present and a hopeful socialist future, they now serve as reposi-
tories 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 Quarterly96, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 91147.
76 Heinz Bude has commented that destiny is a category of the 90s in both Westand East Germany, where both have lost their particular cultures of common destinyafter 1989. Heinz Bude, Schicksal, in his edited Deutschland spricht: Schicksale der
Neunziger (Berlin, 1995), pp. 712. Even so, these new destiny stories are morecommon in the East. Werner Kalinka, Schicksal DDR: Zwanzig Portrats von Opfernund 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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754 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 differ-
ence 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 com-
petition; many of the products introduced in the consumer rush of the 60sstayed 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 pri-
vately 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 socialhistory 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 bridg-
ing the gap between individual and society, private and public memory. While
markers of social distinction long existed within this allegedly classless soci-
etymost notably, Western goods and travel privilegesthe memories ofGDR 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 di-
viding 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 mass-
produced commodities. Catchwords are enough for mutual recognition. Re-
78
Regarding markers of social distinction, see Martin Diewald, Kollektiv, Vi-tamin B, oder Nische? Personliche Netzwerke in der DDR as well as Martin Die-wald and Heike Solga, Soziale Ungleichheiten in der DDR: Die feinen, aber deutlichenUnterschiede 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., Gesell-schaftliche Differenzierung und Legitimatsverfall des DDR-Sozialismus (Tubingen,1992), esp. pp. 154200. This East German solidarity can be seen as a by-product ofsocialist design policy wherein the capitalist cult of differentiation was rejected in favorof 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.
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