Chloe Paver writes:
Unlike other museums in the guide, this museum is a private one. Its displays are neatly laid out but amateurish. When I last visited, the director was hesitating about whether to join ICOM-Deutschland, the national branch of the international association of museums. ICOM sets professional standards for collecting, conservation, research and display.
It’s not difficult to see how the DDR-Museum Zeitreise would have difficulty meeting some of ICOM-Deutschland’s expectations (for those of you with German reading knowledge, they are set out at: http://www.icom-deutschland.de/client/media/8/standards_fuer_museen_2006.pdf).
The key limitation of this museum is the lack of an overarching narrative or indeed of any kind of information structure. Information is offered piecemeal and is not hierarchized: there is no division into a general overview and progressively more precise levels of information. In professional museums, each of these levels would have a different visual identity, identified by different colours, layouts, or text size. At the DDR-Museum Zeitreise, objects are displayed as collections, but not linked to key facts and ideas about the historical past.
As damning as this sounds, the DDR-Museum Zeitreise is an important testament to attitudes towards the material remains of the GDR. After 1989, when GDR industry was forced to restructure, very few GDR goods continued to be manufactured as before. Since design and technical development had stagnated, they could not compete with coveted goods from the West.
As a result, GDR objects became obsolescent with unprecedented speed and finality. Sometimes researchers simplify this process by suggesting that ‘everybody’ in the former GDR threw ‘everything’ away after the fall of the Wall, but that defies logic – money was not plentiful and few people in any social situation throw away useful objects if they don’t indicate status or taste. We know for a fact that plenty of GDR products remain in homes even today, more than 25 years after the fall of the Wall, because amateur museums are either still asking for donations or they are telling potential donors that they have run out of space.
Even so, the scene in the film Goodbye Lenin! in which furniture has been put out on the street for the refuse collectors and an IKEA poster advertises the ubiquitous Billy bookcase sums up the general situation in a popular visual form. Museums like the DDR-Museum Zeitreise arose out of this situation. It offered rich pickings for collectors and there was a sense that if someone didn’t hold on to GDR objects they would disappear, and with them the stories of the population that owned them.
Amateur museums also grew out of (or thrived on) the sense of grievance that many former citizens of the GDR felt about the transition period, especially the mid-1990s. Economic and social restructuring were tough processes for the 20% of Germans that liberated themselves from communism: factories closed down or shed jobs, 80% of academics were dismissed, and people with long years of training found themselves having to re-train for a more lowly role – often under western managers. At the same time, living conditions – housing, rent, transport – did not improve as quickly as anticipated.
The amateur museums of the GDR have therefore been interpreted by researchers as a way for former East Germans to resist the power of the West. East Germans might have been in favour of joining the Federal Republic, but they had not anticipated that their old lives would be cast aside in such a painful way and for so little immediate reward. Keeping hold of objects from the old East was one way of keeping some distance from the unstoppable processes of westernization.
It would be simplistic, however, to suggest that putting household and consumer objects from previous decades in the museum is a purely post-communist phenomenon. Both western Germany and the UK have amateur museums of 1950s and 1960s ephemera or ‘bygones’ with quite similar display methods.
Older visitors from the western states of Germany often enjoy museums of the GDR because they seem to contain objects from their past, too. Historically, this is something of an illusion: the GDR kept pace with the West until some time in the 1960s. Thereafter, Easterners were stuck with goods that their western cousins now viewed as old-fashioned. Even so, the dividing lines between ‘new’ and ‘old’ should not be drawn too clearly: in all countries, communist or not, we live with a mixture of old and new in our houses. Few people spent the 1970s surrounded only by goods made post-1969.
It is very difficult for museums of recent history to convey these kinds of chronological nuances: to show how people experienced the new and the old in their lives. Amateur museums of the GDR don’t even try: displays of GDR technology might show which model followed which, but we are never told what people felt about owning something new or about treasuring an ‘old friend’ even when newer models had left it behind. Many objects in these museums are grouped together as ‘East German’ as if the whole 40 years were one decade.
On my own visit to the museum I found the sheer mass of objects overwhelming – I left the building never wanting to see another object again. But the DDR-Museum Zeitreise makes a good teaching tool. I can set students the task of giving it an information structure. Given that its collection covers so many areas of GDR life, all the makings of a good history museum are there. Usually, students suggest putting 80% of the objects in store and ordering the rest according to themes rather than object categories. Thus, instead of a room full of cameras and a room full of typewriters (which follows a collector’s display logic), one camera might help tell the story of local industry and of amateur photography clubs, while two typewriters might stand for the freedom of dissident writers, on the one hand, and the oppression of the Stasi on the other (as they do in the film Das Leben der Anderen).
German History Museums 