Beyond the Wall: Art and Artifacts from the GDR ed. by Justinian Jampol (review)

Founded in 2002, the Wende Museum sits in Culver City in metropolitan Los Angeles. It is a perhaps surprising location for an archive created to “preserve the diverse material and visual culture of the former Eastern European Soviet-allied states and support the advancement of international scholarship in Cold War history” (894). On the other hand, an amnesiac and agnostic city, where people are, as Bertolt Brecht wrote in “Nachdenkend über die Hölle,” “von nirgendher kommend, nirgendhin fahren,” is also somehow a fitting headquarters for such an examination of artifacts from an extinct country, an archive of which many are still unaware. In his introduction, the museum’s founder, executive director, and editor of the volume, Justinian Jampol, comments on this and observes that the historiography of the German Democratic Republic has not coalesced around a consensus of interpretation. This applies both to the analysis of historical events and to the value of artifacts from this extinct nation. Remarking that much of the GDR’s physical existence was tossed into garbage dumps after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jampol brings to mind the image of Berlin flea markets, which have offered up “commoditized souvenirs of a ruined society, like recovered pieces of a shipwreck” and the jettisoning of material that has often been part of “active and willful forgetting” about the reality of the GDR and aspects of its existence (11).

The book is divided into eight chapters, each helpfully demarcated by tab indentations, making it easy to flip to specific sections. I list the chapter topics here, because they demonstrate the breadth of the volume’s coverage: “Eat, Drink & Smoke,” “Home,” “Design & Fashion,” “Entertainment & Recreation,” “Travel & Transportation,” “Labor & Education,” “Political Life,” and “Iconoclasm & Counterculture.” Each chapter follows an introduction by a scholar which provides fascinating and useful contextual information about life in the GDR. The first chapter’s introduction by Katherine Pence, for instance, provides details about the GDR’s planned economy, its shortage of certain items, and what comprised gastronomic culture in East Germany, a nation that eventually incorporated dishes from other likeminded lands, like Romanian wine and Russian soup (28). Also included are a glossary of GDR terms, a foreword by the head of Thomson Reuters, an introduction, and a brief history of the museum, the latter two by editor Jampol. Each chapter contains a number of one-page treatments of subtopics; the chapter on food and drink, for example, includes pages on “Menus” and “Beverages & Cigarettes” with brief, summary examinations of the subtopics that provide valuable details. One learns, for instance, that the momentous increase in international coffee prices in 1977 damaged the GDR’s economy and greatly affected public morale.

Populating the more than nine hundred pages are colour photographs and reproductions of items in the museum’s collection. Each is accompanied by a description in both English and German, and the entire book is bilingual. The chapter headings point to the variety that one finds when perusing the book; any described range is woefully inadequate, but one proceeds from an advertisement for chocolate at the beginning of chapter 1 to a picture of the Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Straße (as well as the book’s final illustration, a sketch of the museum’s building amid palm trees), with a universe of East German daily life between those bookends. This stunning scope makes a review challenging, but it testifies to the fact that, as Jampol writes in the introduction, “life in the GDR was represented by more than dissidence and repression, and included everyday concerns, habits, and activities” (16). This is a straightforward detail that many discussions of East Germany—including scholarly treatments—often overlook, as they tend to pay most attention to repressive aspects of East German society and citizens’ responses to those, not delving, for example, into clothing catalogues or children’s toys.

In the section on “Home,” we catch glimpses into East Germans...