The German language has acquired strange new phrases since I emigrated. Spend enough time in a different country and your mother tongue moves on without you. One of those modern idioms I’ve never really got the hang of is: “Ist das Kunst oder kann das weg?” which loosely and lamely translates as: “Is this art or is it rubbish?” It was first introduced by a comedian and is now frequently used to poke fun at modern art, implying that the piece in question is so abstract that you can’t even tell it’s art and might mistake it for a piece of rubbish to be binned.
The phrase popped into my head this week, not in its usual humorous sense but rather as a serious question. A Norwegian journalist called me out of the blue on Wednesday. He was after a brief interview on East German art — or, to be more precise, on what happened to art produced in East Germany after the Berlin Wall came down. He’d heard that many GDR sculptures and paintings had been put into storage and that “a lot was thrown away”. He wanted to know: “Was it regarded as garbage?” My mind made that into a headline for our conversation: “Creativity in the GDR: Art or Rubbish?”
If the idea that all art produced in a country over four decades could be dismissed wholesale seems odd to you, I’m with you. But the zeitgeist in 1989 and 1990 was marked by a frenetic desire to get rid of everything GDR and replace it with Western things. There were cases of people chucking their entire furniture out and replacing it with Ikea. East German art suffered the same fate. Much was lost, destroyed, sold off or mothballed. The Art Archive at Castle Beeskow, a good hour south-east of Berlin, alone holds 25,000 pieces on nearly 1,000 square metres of storage space.
Then there were buildings. Every school, every housing complex, every park had art in the GDR. “Kunst am Bau” – public art done through a “percent of art” concept – was an integral part of the utopian socialist vision for architecture. Everyone was supposed to be surrounded by art where they lived, worked and studied. Some of that was overtly political, like the huge mural on the Kulturpalast or Palace of Culture in Dresden. It’s called Der Weg der roten Fahne, or The Path of the Red Flag, and has survived (though trees have been planted in front of it to obscure it one day).
Others were decorative, like the four nude bronze figures “Three Girls and a Boy” who sit by a canal in central Berlin, just opposite the Cathedral. They were once part of a fountain in front of the fancy Palasthotel, which mainly catered to Western visitors to the GDR. When the hotel was demolished after reunification, the bronze posse was put into storage for a few years, then dusted off, rearranged and placed where they are now. Thousands of other pieces of East German art weren’t so lucky. They have vanished forever.
On the heels of the replacement rush post 1989 came years of derision and suspicion aimed at East German art and artists alike. Art produced under a dictatorship was considered no art at all. Westerners assumed that GDR artists were told exactly what to produce and how to produce it. And if some decided to do their own thing regardless, surely censorship squashed any remaining creativity and free will? The logic was that there is no creativity in dictatorships.
GDR artists found themselves confronted with deep suspicion, whether they were loyal to the state, opposed to it or — as was the case with the vast majority — somewhere in between. Often, the most fervent hostility didn’t even come from West Germans but from fellow East Germans who had left the GDR. Georg Baselitz, a prominent painter and sculptor who moved from East to West Berlin in the 1950s, before the Berlin Wall was erected, said in 1990 that East German artists were “simply assholes.”
West Germany, which had welcomed and celebrated the many dissident artists who left the GDR over the years, was happy enough to run with this notion before and after reunification.
This sidelined and often silenced people like the abstract textile artist Christa Jeitner. Like many East Germans, she had a complex relationship with the state. She initially struggled to get an art education in the GDR because of her association with Protestant circles. Switching to West Berlin only worked until the Berlin Wall was built, which cut her off from classes. But she had significant success in East Germany as an artist and restaurator, eventually also joining the Association of Artists. Yet she also continued to clash with the authorities over the style and motives of her work, and exhibited some of her pieces in church settings rather than in official galleries.
It’s a typical story of compromise and agency – more nuance than the reunified Germany could cope with. Gallies didn’t want to be seen to display the work of people whose ideological background they didn’t understand. What if it later turned out that they worked for the Stasi? It was best not to risk it. Like many others, Jeitner vanished from the art scene. She only re-emerged in the early 2000s. By that time, many East German artists were dead or had lost their spark.
Even East German galleries displayed very little East German art after 1990. This was the subject of a sizeable controversy in Dresden in 2017, which was dubbed “Dresdner Bilderstreit” or “Dresden Painting Controversy” by the media at the time. Dresden, especially its famous Albertinum museum of modern art, had once been a hub of GDR culture. Yet many locals complained that it displayed very little East German art post-1990.
Since then, I feel things have calmed down a little. Some artists reappeared, new ones emerged. Surviving public art is often protected by law now and carefully restored. Some GDR-trained artists have also begun to build an international reputation. One of them – admittedly, one that only half fits that label – is Annette Schröter.
Schröter trained as a porcelain painter at the GDR’s State Porcelain Works in Meissen and later at Leipzig’s renowned High School for Graphics and Book Design (1977–82). In Leipzig, she became increasingly frustrated with the limitations of travel, political repression and the limited horizons that came with living in a small country that only allowed people to leave when it felt like it.
She and her husband applied for permission to emigrate despite the risk of repression this posed to them and their families. Eventually, this was granted, and the couple moved to Hamburg in the mid-1980s. Now Schröter is back in Leipzig.
I met her in Cambridge yesterday, where we talked about her art on a panel at Magdalene College, where her work is currently on display in an exhibition curated by Matthew Shaul. If you missed that, you can still see Schröter’s exhibition there until 9 January. It’s under the title “Escape from Colditz - Papercuts, Collage and Installation”, an allusion to her origins near Colditz Castle, her escape and her eventual return — “a contemplation on the theme of escape or escapism presented in a unique series of papercuts and collage.”
Schröter’s work readily demonstrates that art created by GDR-trained artists is interesting, varied, and deeply resonant of the time and circumstances under which it was created. And this applies to the things she made and painted when she still lived in East Germany, too. Take her 1983 painting “Frau in Uniformkleid” – “Woman in Uniform Dress”. She says she painted it “out of sheer rage” over the GDR regime’s plans to introduce compulsory military service for women. “With much rage in my belly, I painted my own uniform dress,” Schröter recalls.
Another 1983 painting was called “Zwei Frauen im Schnee – oder Scheiden tut weh“ – “Two Women in Snow – Or Farewell Woe”. It processes Schröter’s grief and worry when her best friend tried to flee the GDR via an extremely dangerous route through Hungary. There she walked into the Danube, allowing the river to carry her downstream to Yugoslavia. She was in the water for 8 hours, and even then, it was uncertain what Yugoslavia would do – arrest and deport her or allow her to travel on to West Germany.
It took two months before she was taken to the Austrian border and told to cross. From there, she went to West Berlin and contacted her best friend. But in the meantime, Schröter had no idea if her friend was dead or alive. She found solace in art — art that might have been dismissed and vanished into storage in 1990 if she hadn’t left the GDR. In her case, the Hamburg culture authority bought the painting.
Anyone who spends any time looking into East German art and artists in any depth can see that the idea of dismissing them wholesale as worthless dictatorship output is absurd. People are people, and they will always find ways of being expressive. If anything, dictatorships and adverse conditions tend to sharpen their desire to do so.
East German art is art, not rubbish. It should be displayed and discussed, not consigned to the dustbin of history.
Another fascinating read with my Sunday morning coffee. It reminded me of your earlier article about the collection at Spandau Castle (https://open.substack.com/pub/katjahoyer/p/from-hitlers-horses-to-lenins-head?r=1flx1b&utm_medium=ios). I suppose it was inevitable that the ‘victorious’ BRD would want to belittle, dismiss, and remove the public art of the former DDR. As with all erstwhile authoritarian regimes there are examples of state sponsored art of little merit yet even there, historians can trace the progress or otherwise of the former regime. Last year I read a book (difficult read) about the challenges faced in the former USSR to politically correctly memorialise the Second World War. It neatly encapsulated the fiery hoops the artists had to jump through to cleave to the official line of the moment. The art from the former DDR may not be to our taste yet it helps to complete the picture of a vanished state and failed political system.
Fascinating. It's making me wonder about music too - were DDR composers also shunned after reunification? It is harder to identify the form and content of music with politics unless it is setting explicitly political texts. But here we have tended to celebrate Eastern bloc composers, such as Shostakovich, who like the visual artists you discuss here, had a more complicated and nuanced relationship with the regimes they laboured under.