The tension is right there in the name of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. It sits inside a 1953 kindergarten building in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany, a city that was born from utopian socialist ideals. After World War II left Germany in ruins, the newly formed German Democratic Republic (GDR) saw an opportunity to build an ideal socialist society from scratch. This city – originally called Stalinstadt or Stalin’s city – was part of this project, rising out of the forest near a giant steel plant.
The museum's home in a former kindergarten feels fitting – the building's original Socialist Realist stained glass windows by Walter Womacka still depict children learning and playing with an almost religious dignity. But museum director Andrea Wieloch isn't as interested in the utopian promises as she is in the "blood and flesh kind of reality" of life in the GDR. The museum's collection of 170,000 objects, many donated by local residents who wanted to preserve their history, tells the story of the GDR through the lens of how people actually lived during the country's 40-year existence.
The approach of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life is to treat the history of the GDR as contested, full of stories and memories that resist simple narratives. In this episode, Wieloch describes how her approach sets the museum apart from other GDR museums in Germany including ones that cater to more western audiences.
Image: Socialist Realist stained glass windows by Walter Womacka welcome visitors in this former kindergarten.
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Transcript
Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 108. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.
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Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsener. Museum archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes. So let's get started.
After World War II, all of Germany was in ruins. Almost nothing was left standing after 12 years of Nazi rule and 6 years of war. Mass migration, hunger, and homelessness defined the immediate post-war period as millions of displaced people sought to rebuild their lives among the rubble.
For the newly formed German Democratic Republic or GDR, the chance to start over – and demonstrate the utopia of the socialist system – took on a great importance. The East German government saw urban planning as a way to both solve the housing crisis and showcase socialist ideals through modern, centrally planned cities built from scratch. I visited one of these planned cities about an hour and a half east of Berlin.
Andrea Wieloch: Where we are sitting now was basically forest 75 years ago, and then they decided to plant a steel factory and a city around it. It was back in the days where there was really everything destroyed by war. An island of a real utopia with nice housing and facilities for everyone. So people from all over GDR came here and when the city was first founded, it was called Stalinstadt. So, “city of Stalin”.
Stalinstadt, which started being built in 1951, is now called Eisenhüttenstadt, which literally means Iron Hat City for the steel plant. Planning and building a new city and a steel factory in a place that was just a forest during the Nazi regime was a sharp break with the past – the planned city reminds me of parts of Bulgarian cities also built in the socialist times, and unlike most places I’ve visited in Germany, I’m not immediately on the lookout for dark signs of the Nazi past. I can imagine the relief of this place for the first people who moved here. Maybe, for a moment, it did feel like utopia.
Of course, this utopia didn't actually happen, no utopia has. But the GDR lasted about 40 years and those 40 years covered a lot of daily life. I'm here to visit a museum that puts the tension of utopia right in the name: the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life.
Andrea Wieloch: I do like the space in between utopia and daily life. That is my focus, that tension or ambivalence. And I'm frankly not really interested in utopia, I think, because it's a mind fabricated thing and I do like the blood and flesh kind of reality.
This is Andrea Wieloch, director of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life.
Andrea Wieloch: Hello, my name is Andrea Wieloch. I am a German museum professional and I am the director of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life.
The museum – a kind of documentation center of everyday life in the GDR – is built inside a former kindergarten which opened in 1953. The central staircase still features the original, very colorful, stained glass windows by Socialist Realist artist Walter Womacka depicting children learning and playing with an almost religious dignity.
Wieloch says that a big part of the collection comes from a public announcement for people to bring in objects that they wanted to save. Today the collection has 170,000 objects of everyday life and of every aspect of GDR life. The permanent exhibition, which opened in 2012, called Everyday Life: GDR, uses these objects to give the visitor an introduction to politics, society and everyday life in the country.
Right inside the entrance to the museum, under the stained glass kindergarten scene, is one of these objects: a rusty TV antenna.
Andrea Wieloch: The antenna you see in the front is a really great example for a life hack, basically, because someone did it himself.
People living in Eisenhüttenstadt could fashion an antenna to get western television broadcasts in part because of their proximity to West Berlin and favorable terrain. It started as something you could do if you were brave enough to do something forbidden, but by the 70s, it became a special privilege.
Andrea Wieloch: One privilege you would get here but only starting in the late 70s was getting West TV and radio, which was forbidden. But they needed workers, so that was a privilege here, not in other parts of the country.
Amazing. Well, it also illustrates, so before it was a privilege, it was a hack. And I feel, feel like that is the bridge between utopia and daily life. It's because , in a true utopia, there would be nothing to hack because everything is already perfect.
Andrea Wieloch: Yeah and that's a two-way street. You go from hacking to utopia again, because of course in the 40 years that the GDR was existing, there were really waves. And you've seen upstairs the new exhibition we are putting on with plastic furniture, that was a wave of utopia again, in order to also make people not jealously look at the West, but really a propaganda to really tell we are able here, we are future, we can send a man to the moon as well, kind of, you know.
The privileges associated with working in the Steel Factory is an example of the centrality of work in the way this utopia was structured.
Andrea Wieloch: All aspects of life in the socialist society were organized around work. Which means your housing was organized around work. The way you made holidays, where you would put your children to kindergarten or school, how you would spend your free time. There were club houses all over the city. There were artists coming into the factories and the worker was very well taken care of in the socialist society. And here in that city, it meant you had a beautiful flat, you had all the facilities that would really enable you to be a good worker, be at work and not think of anything else.
Wieloch was born in 1983 in the GDR, and so has a better memory of the period after 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, the GDR dissolved, and the process of German reunification began.
Andrea Wieloch: I was six years when the Wall came down and I was living with my family at the Polish border, so really far away from what was happening. And I remember my parents sitting in front of the TV and relatives coming in and that it was something special, I remember that. But besides that, I'm more shaped by the reality of the 90s, mass unemployment and lots of friends leaving the area with their families in order to look for better places and a more prosperous life.
The Museum of Utopia and Daily Life, and the way it presents the history of the GDR, is unique in Germany.
Andrea Wieloch: Yeah, I think we are talking about a very young history. And it's – I hope I get the word right – it's a contested history. It's one that is not set yet. Where we know no history is set, but as soon as people who can talk about the history aren't there anymore, we rely on what we by then have agreed upon. And there are very different ways in which the history of GDR got told within the last, let's say, 30 years.
Wieloch says that she’d classify four types of museums that interpret the history of the GDR in modern Germany. The first is the entertaining museum, places like the slick GDR Museum in Berlin which caters to international tourists and highlights the most daring escape stories. Then there’s the museums, mostly founded by the government, which talk mostly about GDR's dictatorship and the oppression. The third is so-called “wild” or “amature” museums, where individual people, often not tied to any public institution, just collect the things they love and, of course, entangle their own memory into their collections.
Andrea Wieloch: And the fourth place kind of is our museum, which to look into all this life and find the ordinary and the extraordinary there, but also ask about structures and about various perspectives. And that way we attract not only visitors from all around the world. We also attract the neighbors, the schools, scientists, artists. Usually we attract people who are who like to read in between lines. All of them are getting into a really nuanced, interesting dialogue and it's always happening. And for me, the most exciting is, and then I really step back and just listen, when people who have experienced GDR talk to each other and they kind of compare their memories and they are not fixed with it. They are very open and flexible and they really get into questioning really what happened there, and did we interpret it right, or was it state ideology, and that's really awesome to see. I think it's just a great practice for life.
In my discussions with Wieloch, she underscored her feeling that many people from former West Germany haven’t taken the time to understand the experience of growing up in the East – and that museums like the GDR Museum in Berlin, while entertaining, aren’t helping.
Andrea Wieloch: We are very accepted by people who experienced the GDR because there's always this discussion, is that a western view on eastern history or is that something more outweighed? I don't know if that's the real – balanced. Is it more balanced? And, yeah, that's what you find here. Yeah. A lively discussion.
I noticed this lively discussion while I toured the museum. Groups of older people telling younger members of their family that the coffee thermoses were exactly the same ones in their kitchen or the ubiquity of one brand of baby powder.
Because material culture under the GDR was much more narrow than it is today, it is likely that your uncle had the exact same motorcycle, or your dad had the exact same portable radio on display.
I toured with my mom, who was raised in socialist Bulgaria, and she noted the similarities in the outfits of the “young pioneer” uniforms she used to wear and the graphic design of propaganda posters.
Andrea Wieloch: I want to create a space that raises questions. That's also a safe enough space for you to take the creative risk and maybe think twice and think if I just correlate your own memory and knowledge with it and and then get into a conversation. That's the aim that we have here. Therefore, we invite different people and in groups with their own practices and questions in order to really enrich the conversation, because it's complicated and we like it that way. You know, it's it's ambivalence.
Ian (in room) yeah. And it's also noticeably different from the way that the. media in the GDR operated because it's complicated was not the message. The message was actually it's simple and these are the reasons and if you are a pioneer and that means that you enjoy sport and you love to be clean and you love your parents and you love the workers and there is no, there's no ambiguity in there. And I think it's also what you've demonstrated is that you can also have that same kind of simplicity on the other side of the wall. And so creating a space where you say it's complicated is somewhat radical in itself.
Andrea Wieloch: Yeah, I think it is. And we all struggle with being okay with all the ambivalences and with not knowing the right or wrong answer. And it would be a mistake to paint the history here too sweet now, just because we don't concentrate on the repressive aspects. But I think it's for those people who experience GDR. It was their life. Just imagine someone comes to you and tells you the way you lived, you loved, you raised your children, you worked, you looked at everything is wrong. I think it's as damaging as to tell someone you're always right with things.
The museum seems so effective at addressing the audience of people who are familiar with the GDR, that it makes me wonder how the museum approaches today’s young people who never lived through it.
Andrea Wieloch: Yeah. You're putting the finger right into our most vulnerable spot because it's mostly like that. A family comes in of different generations and then one teaches the other. That's how it works in the moment. But that is a big thing. But actually the new generation is very interested. So especially also foreigners, there are less clichés or less prejudice that way and big openness. So yeah, I have the feeling the interest is rather rising because people who lived here for a long time, they also want to see something new and not always circle around themselves.
There are plans for a permanent exhibition, with a target open date of 2029. The revamp would use some of the adjacent buildings as a campus with more room for programs and storage.
Andrea Wieloch: And we want to, first of all, give you a closer look into to our storage. And then we would like to really take all those questions and practices that all our cooperation partners brought here and discuss them with the audience to have different displays for parts of our collection that show the collection and show you already what is that material world that we are collecting in the museum world, we are really in the peripheral area. So Berlin is close enough for us to have visitors from a metropolitan audience too. But it is also too far away to be gaining from the prosperous big city. So we are in a city that was ahead a 56,000 inhabitants now has 24,000 inhabitants. 40% of them are over 65. And we have a wonderful task to address a metropolitan or even international audience, and then also be relevant for the community we have here. So you asked me for children, I can tell you our program for dementia. So we're working with the school that educates people in the care sector. And they have 600 students. And with them we developed a program with all day, everyday objects and from the GDR. And they bring them either to the care homes or people from care homes come here. And we do a lot of programming around that target group. I think that's really my focus. The museum as a set of cultural techniques, a toolbox to know the world, to get a hold of the world, and to also find a consciousness around those tools that you're using. So it's still a long way to go and a lot of money to collect. But yeah, that's what we do right now.
The everyday experience of the person plotting their daring escape was different from the person just trying to get by and they both were different from the worker content to set up a better antenna to enjoy western TV shows. But in the GDR at least, they may have all been drinking out of the same type of coffee thermos. And you can see it at the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. This has been Museum Archipelago.
