Chloe Paver writes:
A museum of ‘everyday life’ sounds harmless enough, especially since German social historians have been working in the field of ‘Alltagsgeschichte’ (the history of everyday life) for decades.
In the case of East Germany, however, the word ‘Alltag’ has become a bone of contention. When amateur and semi-professional museums of the GDR began to spring up across the former East in the 1990s, many claimed to be representing the ‘Alltag’ of the GDR rather than its politics. Disillusioned by the widespread equation of East Germany with its corrupt regime, museum workers sought a broader understanding of East German life. This included activities beyond politics, such as family and the home. Such exhibitions allowed those who felt they had lived decent lives under communism to see themselves reflected in the displays.
This reading of ‘Alltag’ may in part have been a way of making sense of the vast collections of GDR household goods that were amassed by keen collectors after 1990, but there seems also to have been a genuine grassroots desire to represent ordinary lives as having been well-lived under difficult circumstances, instead of dismissing them as lives monopolized by a corrupt politics, lives ‘unlived’ while waiting for the real life of democracy to begin.
Some researchers have criticised the state-run history museums for failing to respond to this desire for even-handedness. One possible counter-argument is that the ‘state’ is not abstract and unchanging. Since 1990 there have been seven governments covering most of the combinations possible in the German system: majority conservative, social democrat/green, social democrat/conservative, and conservative/liberal. If the ‘state’ is intent on propagating a one-sided view of ordinary GDR citizens then there is an unusual cross-party consensus about it.
Besides – you might reasonably object – museums are run by museum professionals of every political stripe who operate relatively free from political interference. Possibly so, but the situation in Germany is different from the UK. During the 1990s, as it became clearer that remembering past German crimes was to be a cornerstone of the united Germany, the final Kohl government set out a list of museums and memorials of national importance for which central government would henceforth take financial responsibility. This was necessary because cultural institutions are generally funded by the regions in Germany.
In 2008, an addendum to this schedule of memorials and museums (formally called the Fortschreibung der Gedenkstättenkonzeption des Bundes) was agreed by the Grand Coalition, the equivalent of a coalition between the Tories and Labour. Though some new institutions were added, this second document was much more than a list. It set out what was to be remembered and how. Under the section on East Germany, the coalition agreed that museums to be funded by central government would cover four subject areas, one of which was ‘Society and Everyday Life’.
‘Everyday life’ was then defined, albeit in an unconventional way. The first statement made the case for tackling ‘Alltag’ in museums: this was vital in order to take a stand against trivializations of the horrors of communism, including manifestations of nostalgia for the former East. Since some of the existing museums of the GDR ‘everyday’ were suspected of peddling such trivializations, this statement wrested the term ‘Alltag’ out of their hands and into the safer hands of the state.
The next statement didn’t seem, on the face of it, to have much to do with everyday life, but can be understood as the lens through which the state wanted everyday life to be seen: ‘It must be made clear that the people of the GDR were subject to comprehensive control by the state and were exposed to a massive pressure to conform, just as the dictatorship was only able to draw its power from the willingness of society to co-operate. The instruments and mechanisms used by the ruling SED to penetrate the whole of society and all areas of people’s lives with its ideology, from the crèche to school and university, and from working life to leisure time, must be clearly identified. At the same time, it is important to document how and where people in the GDR attempted to escape the reach of the Party.’
It’s difficult to imagine a wording that would crush more effectively any sentimental notion of a ‘life well-lived’ in the shadow of politics. Every museum visitor must be made to understand that no area of life was free of state control in the GDR and that such freedoms as people exercised constituted opposition to Party control (and not, God forbid, the expression of their personality or the use of their talents).
We have no equivalent to this document in the UK. The closest we might come is the periodic changes to the school history curriculum, each time Labour passes the baton to the Conservatives or vice versa. The idea that our two main parties might be obliged to sit down and hammer out an agreement on how slavery or the labour movement are to be remembered in state-funded museums is far-fetched.
The House of History in Bonn has long included private life in its displays about the GDR (framing it appropriately as a state-controlled space) and the other main state history museum, the German Histororical Museum in Berlin, held an exhibition on ‘Party Dictatorship and Everyday Life’ in 2007. However, since the second Gedenkstättenkonzeption more energy has been expended to take firm control of the slippery term ‘Alltag’. In 2011, the House of History opened its exhibition in the Tränenpalast under the title ‘Border Experiences. Everyday Life in Divided Germany’ and in 2013, despite having initially proposed an exhibition based on a major collection of East German industrial design, the House of History opened its exhibition ‘Alltag in der DDR’ at the Kulturbrauerei. I could find only one small, residual mention of design in ‘Alltag in der DDR’, yet an exhibition narrative based on the GDR’s design history would have produced an interesting display – with room for a celebration of East German talent.
German History Museums 