Art Outside the Lines: New Perspectives on GDR Art Culture (review)

GDR art culture has in recent years been the subject of a wide range of studies and commentary seeking to broaden the perspective on artistic life in the East German state beyond the limiting political and ideological references and instead to review art in and for itself. In the introduction to Art Outside the Lines, editors Elaine Kelly and Amy Wlodarski similarly set out to challenge reductive interpretations of GDR artistic culture, which was too long “limited to blunt paradigms of dissidence and conformism” (3). They emphasize that art in the GDR has not been well served by such evaluations; and the persistent view of Socialist Realism as a dogmatic bulwark to Modernism has precluded a nuanced view of the relationship between artists and the SED. Such views are not in fact as unwavering as the editors claim. Though there is undoubtedly a prevailing (nonspecialist) idea that all art produced in Socialist states was party-loyal, some scholars recognized even before 1989 that the relationship between artists and party was often more complicated and involved more negotiation. Still, the declared intention to “provide a broader picture of artistic life in the GDR” (8) by focusing not only on the public and international aesthetic debates but also on the private spheres is commendable, and aligns Art Outside the Lines with alternative accounts of the GDR provided in other recent studies.

For the most part the essays, written by a variety of musicologists, cultural historians, Germanists, and curators, do succeed both in widening the debate on art culture in the GDR and establishing it in the context of contemporary GDR scholarship and wider debates on, for example, gender studies (as in Nina Noeske’s thoughtful chapter on gender relations in East German musical life) and memory studies. The volume offers a wealth of subjects and disciplines, many of which have received scant attention in English-language studies. April A. Eisman’s essay on Bernhard Heisig, for example, provides a useful overview of the artist’s reputation in the GDR and concentrates in particular on the reaction to the murals he created in 1965, which were the subject of a fierce debate between Heisig and his supporters and Alfred Kurella, a debate that was in part conducted in the annals of various national newspapers and journals. That such a dialogue could be conducted so openly may surprise readers. Indeed, the volume’s eclectic range offers a number of surprising facts (another being that it was “primarily African-American poetry which was circulated throughout East Germany” in the postwar period). Further evidence of public discussion is provided by Laura Silverberg in one of the volume’s four chapters on music in the GDR. Silverberg examines the conflict concerning new directions in music that arose between reform-minded musicologists and composers and the stern musicologists who steadfastly opposed them.

Sigrid Hofer considers the ways in which Dresdner artists in the 1950s and 1960s were influenced by the prewar avant-garde and the “lively dialogue” (89) with those in the west, a reminder that the GDR was not as consistently isolationist as accounts of the Cold War often suggest. Art in Dresden is also the subject of Silke Wagler’s essay, but Wagler focuses on those artists whose cultural cachet in the GDR often resulted in their works’ subsequent relegation or even destruction after 1989, often with “no regard to [their] actual value” (239). The gratuitous obliteration of aspects of GDR cultural life has been well documented, as have the rescue campaigns. Wagler, who is head of the Kunstfonds in Dresden, offers an informative account of the fate of such art and the reexamination of the GDR’s artistic legacy by contemporary artists and public.

A curatorial perspective is also offered by Justinian Jampol, executive director of the Wende Museum in Los Angeles. The Californian collection of GDR art and ephemera has attracted much attention (not all of...