East German Art History | Art from the GDR: From Lenin and Lamps

A friend, an artist by profession, recently told me at a birthday party where the beautifully designed lamps that no one wanted when the Palace of the Republic was demolished have ended up. Numerous lights from the so-called "rod-shaped lighting system," in typical GDR design, were simply left behind because they were considered relics from a bygone era, old junk with the reputation of originating from the wrong society and the wrong time. It was an unwritten rule: all items produced in the GDR had to be immediately replaced with new, contemporary junk from capitalist production.

That was the general situation in the first ten to fifteen years after the end of the GDR: everything had to go. Out of sight, out of mind. In the early 1990s, before dealers realized that other items from the GDR besides fragments of the Berlin Wall could be sold profitably, it was not uncommon to see brand-new GDR furniture, dishes, household goods, and the blue volumes of the Marx/Engels complete works lying in piles of bulky waste on the sidewalks in Berlin, alongside pictures of Honecker and certificates of honor ("Certificate for outstanding achievements in the national reconstruction effort") in plastic or imitation leather folders.

What was once carelessly thrown away because it was considered inferior socialist junk, a poor copy of which is now considered an "exclusive home accessory of a very special kind".

The "Mitropa" plates I once picked out of such a pile and took home are no longer with me: some broke during moves, others I gave away. But I still possess a delightful Berlin city map from that time, published by VEB Tourist-Verlag, which I still can't get enough of: On its left side, you can see how the area of ​​"West Berlin," colored yellow and without any further markings, juts right into the city of the "capital of the GDR," whose center was apparently the Grünau S-Bahn station, without any explanation to the uninformed viewer as to what the old rose-colored strip framing the yellow "West Berlin" area was.

The lamps left behind in the rubble of the Palace of the Republic, which no one wanted, were taken by a friend of the aforementioned artist and stored somewhere, because he could no longer bear to witness the destruction. Their whereabouts are unknown. What is clear, however, is that an "original Palace of the Republic lamp/Sputnik system lamp/GDR design" is being offered on a well-known online auction platform. The current price is €12,500 ("or best offer"), collection in Kleinmachnow.

The fundamentally broken and perverse nature of capitalism can be seen, among other things, in the following fact: In the "shop" of the so-called Humboldt Forum, located in the frighteningly ugly, reconstructed "Berlin City Palace" (on the site of the former Palace of the Republic), imitations of the aforementioned GDR ceiling lights are now being sold to tourists for €3,895 each: "The high-quality ceiling lamp, designed according to historical models, is a home accessory of a very special kind. The exclusive design is based on the lights that once hung in the Palace of the Republic and is a real eye-catcher in any room. The ceiling lamp with twelve spheres was produced in a very limited edition and is available exclusively here." What was once carelessly thrown away because it was considered inferior socialist junk, its poor imitation is now considered an "exclusive home accessory of a very special kind." The Times They Are A-Changin'.

Another, comparable Berlin provincial farce is the pathetic squabble over the East Berlin Lenin monument , which once stood on Leninplatz (Lenin Square), which, logically, hasn't been called Leninplatz since 1992. Because, like absolutely everything that reminded people of the GDR, the aim at the time was to make it disappear as completely as possible – keyword: relics from a bygone era – but even the extremely hard-line Berlin CDU under Diepgen suspected that it wouldn't make a very good impression to simply smash up works of art and then hand the pieces over to the waste management department for disposal, the monument was dismantled into 129 individual pieces in 1991 and – as children sometimes did with things they wanted to hide from their parents – buried in a sandpit, as far away as possible, on the outskirts of Berlin. I wouldn't call this action the sensible behavior of mature, sane adults.

Nearly 25 years later – because hardly anyone remembered the GDR, which was indeed dead, but whose carcass was still being vigorously attacked (the “historian” Ilko Sascha-Kowalczuk still earns his living from this), apart from a few boomers – the monument head, which funnily enough had not been found for a while, was dug up again to be shown as an exhibit in an exhibition.

Throwing things away or hiding them – these seem to be not only the two main strategies of the Federal Republic of Germany in dealing with art objects from the GDR, but also the two most common practices in dealing with German history.

I'm not sure whether these two approaches shouldn't be reconsidered in a better future. What is certain, however, is that the undisputed largest Pop Art artwork of the GDR has been saved. It is currently housed in the German Historical Museum: the nearly eleven-meter-high and over five-meter-wide neon sign of the VEB Chemische Werke Buna combine, made of plastics, sheet steel, and fluorescent tubes. Erected in 1978 at the Elbe bridge near Coswig, it advertised the chemical combine. Whenever I used to travel on the transit route between West Germany and West Berlin, I would marvel at the brightly shining lettering on the advertising sculpture in yellow, orange, red, and white, its overwhelming beauty almost taking my breath away: "Plaste und Elaste aus Schkopau" (Plastics and Elastomers from Schkopau).