In an essay reflecting on the fall of the Berlin Wall, German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck noted that one of the most disorienting aspects for East Germans was the sudden reclassification of their ordinary lives. From one moment to the next, the routines of an entire society became artefacts.
“Our everyday lives weren’t everyday lives anymore, they were an adventure that we had survived, our customs were suddenly an attraction… From that moment on, my childhood belonged in a museum,” she wrote.
Erpenbeck’s ambivalence about this process is clear: how the West, as victor, scripted a narrative that left little space for the hopes, struggles and memories of its new compatriots. And if there’s still something voyeuristic in the West’s gaze – with East Germans cast as ungrateful recipients of capitalist benevolence, their former lives preserved in amber – it raises a question: If those lives became trapped in a museum, which one? Where should we go to find the fossilised traces of daily life under “really existing socialism”?
Each object has multiple meanings: technical history, industrial history, social history
As of March 13, there is a new candidate in Berlin: the DDR Depot, in Marzahn. Across two large halls, its 360,000 items represent one of the largest collections of everyday objects from the former DDR. This is both a research centre and a place of remembrance, but it’s also somewhere for former citizens of East Germany to bring whatever they might have – items of personal or political significance that, for one reason or another, they’ve decided to hold on to for over three decades. The majority of the vast collection that fills these enormous halls was brought here by members of the public, with someone turning up to donate a new item almost every day.
As they come in, most of these objects are inspected personally by the director of the collection, Eric Denis Strohmeier-Wimmer. Showing us around, he stops at an old-fashioned pushchair.
“We picked this up two weeks ago, from north of Berlin, in Brandenburg, and when we did, the donor told us with tears in her eyes that she had been pushed around in that pushchair as a baby,” Strohmeier-Wimmer says. “As a historian, I can tell you the official history of the object: that it’s a Kinderwagen from Brennabor, a company which [had] existed since the end of the 19th century and produced baby carriages. I can say that this model likely dates from the late 1940s or early 1950s, meaning the design is still based on pre-war models. I can say that production was resumed by the Soviets after the end of the war, and that the factories were all converted into public property, or I can point out that the suspension is missing. But what mattered to the donor was that it was hers, that it had carried her as a baby.
“So you see, each object has multiple meanings: technical history, industrial history, social history – and a personal one.”
Another item that captures something of daily routine is similarly unremarkable to look at: a simple wooden object that resembles a vending machine, but without any mechanical parts. This is a Brotspender, a self-service bread dispenser found in East German state-run grocery stores known as Kaufhallen.
Behind a clear plastic or glass screen, bread rolls were piled up in two columns. The unit was divided down the middle to separate two different types of roll – white rolls on one side and darker rye or wholemeal on the other, for instance. At the bottom, there was a short metal tray where customers could reach in and take a roll. The only problem was scarcity; the rolls would often be gone by the afternoon. So if you wanted fresh bread, you had to take time out of your working day to go shopping, or coordinate with your partner.
The DDR aimed to be a gender-equal society: men and women were expected both to work full-time, with children cared for in free, state-run kindergartens. In this one object, then, we can read a story about the social life of a society. Small things, easily forgotten: who picked up bread? Who adjusted their schedule? How did families manage time together? When the Wall came down, it was these sort of ingrained routines of daily life which disappeared overnight.
A man came to me and said, ‘You’ve done a good job, but you should be more neutral politically’ What did he mean?
Motorbikes, a fire engine, the original glass doors and marble-panelled walls from the Palast der Republik, shelf after shelf of East German TVs, military uniforms, automatic ticket machines – walking around the depot, you begin to wonder: What are the material objects any society needs to reproduce itself?
According to Strohmeier-Wimmer, 90% of the visitors to this museum are former citizens of the East. “They bring a lot of memories with them. We have the tableware from the former Palast der Republik – that brings people back. Or in the hall with the motorcycles, people come and say, ‘Ah yes, that’s the one I had!’ or ‘That’s what my grandfather rode.’
“Most of the people who come here are 60 or older. You can count the children who visit on one hand. And some guests can be quite critical. Even if we’re expected to remain neutral in how we present things, that still means presenting facts. And the facts speak clearly: it was a repressive system, a dictatorship.
“A man came to me the other day, took a tour and said, ‘You’ve done a good job, but you should be more neutral politically’ What did he mean? We are objective. But perhaps the facts do a good job of criticising the system by themselves”.
While we were there, two separate visitors arrived to donate personal items. One woman brought a biker’s jacket, leather trousers, and a cap; her husband had belonged to a motorcycle gang, and she had arranged photographs from that time in a careful album. Another came with her husband, also donating objects.
There is a macabre tradition in German hunting lodges of displaying an overwhelming number of killed animals, their heads mounted on every available inch of wall space. And after some time at the DDR Depot, you begin to feel that a similar logic is at work. The sheer volume of objects, arranged in their hundreds of thousands, are there to document a vanished way of life. But they are also trophies from the great ideological hunt of the Cold War, catalogued not only to remember but to affirm the victory of the West. There is an air of triumphalism about this (private and for-profit) collection. You might expect to accuse a place like this of Ostalgie – nostalgia for the East – and perhaps some of the visitors who donate their goods would like to fondly recall their youth. But the storehouse receiving these tokens from their former lives does not share that sentiment: it appears to preserve their world but works to celebrate ours, and the visitors who make the trip out to Marzahn with their personal relics perform an act of generous, careful remembrance that can feel at odds with the museum’s latent intent.
“There are lots of people who say, ‘It was better back then’,” says Strohmeier-Wimmer. “I’ve experienced that in my own family. Maybe they have problems with freedom, coming from a loss of home, a loss of identity. The fact is, after 1990, most people had significantly more opportunities. I cannot explain why so many in the East vote for parties that want to take away what they fought for in 1989. They are overwhelmed by their own freedom.”
