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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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East German Memory and Material Culture 733

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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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 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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736 Betts

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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738 Betts

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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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 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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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 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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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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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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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 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 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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752 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 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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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.

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/