What's a memory worth?
What's a memory worth?
East German objects have gone from outdated to collectible
The fall of the Berlin Wall in the autumn of 1989 is remembered by many people today as one of the most important events in modern history. It was an emblematic moment that represented the end of an era and the dawn of a new one. Many people flocked to Berlin from all over the world to be there, to take pictures, to grab some kind of souvenir – ideally a piece of the crumbling Wall itself.
The Berlin Wall became a historical artefact and site instantly. Parts of it were shipped to museums and other locations. There is a three-slab section in New York’s United Nations Sculpture Garden. London has a segment in Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park, just outside the Imperial War Museum. Nelson Mandela was gifted a piece which is now in Cape Town. There are dozens of others all around the world with every location attributing its own historical significance to their piece of history. In Berlin itself, people took pictures on both sides of the Wall and the area in between, formally known as the ‘death strip’.
Far fewer people recognised at that moment that it wasn’t just the Berlin Wall that was becoming history but the state that had built it too. Less than a year after these momentous events in November 1989, at midnight on 3 October 1990, the German Democratic Republic was consigned to the history books.
There was little desire to preserve any of the GDR’s other physical manifestations as history. East Germans had pined for goods from ‘the West’ for so long that they had acquired a quasi-magical allure. While the Wall was up, making travel to West Germany difficult to impossible for the vast majority of GDR citizens, their access to Western consumerism had been extremely limited. There were, however, the so-called Intershops, which sold Western products for Western currency within the GDR itself. Extortionate prices only heightened the appeal of their stock.
When I interviewed former East Germans for Beyond the Wall, many struggled to put into words the vivid memories they had of walking into an Intershop: the garish colours and shiny plastic wrappers that looked so alien in a socialist world that did not rely on advertising or appealing product design. But the thing that East Germans remember most of all is the scent of the Intershop: an evocative mixture of intensely perfumed washing powders and soaps combined with the comforting aroma of roast coffee and the oddly exciting smell of new plastic products. ‘It just smelled of the West,’ many East Germans still reminisce.
Many took this smell home and savoured it. Lux soap bars were placed in between clothes or towels in the cupboard while they gave off their scent and were only used for their intended purpose long after it had faded. Empty bottles of Western tipple were refilled with the cheap East German equivalent and put back in the cupboard in the hope that party guests wouldn’t notice.
So when all of ‘the West’ suddenly arrived in all of the shops in 1990, there was a frantic run on everything that people had longed for for so long. This ranged from the humble request for a Mars bar to clothes, furniture and cars. GDR products seemed dated, familiar and distinctly uncool.
My family were no exception to this rule. Like many others, they immediately set about swapping the outdated family Trabant car for something bigger and better in the summer of 1990. It hadn’t been such a long time since the white Trabant had seemed a desirable thing – hard to come by and new ones had a waiting list of years. So my parents had opted for a white, used model, paying 8,000 marks for it – not far off the price of a new one but available immediately.
But once the Wall was down and revealed an infinite world of possibilities, the Trabant suddenly looked as obsolete as it was with its tiny Duroplast body and underpowered two-stroke engine. Suddenly, little things that had been annoying but accepted facts of life became big things. My sister had just been born and to get her pram into the boot you had to take off its wheels. There’d be no such trouble with the bigger Western models. They were ‘real’ cars that would be as comfortable as they were fast.
But the run on VWs, Opels and BMWs had been such that there were barely any used cars available despite the concerted efforts of West German car dealerships to get their stock to the East. Used car dealerships suddenly sprung up everywhere in 1990. In the first half of that year alone, around 80,000 old cars were taken to the GDR, not all of them in great condition, most massively overpriced as East Germans had no idea how much they were worth. A joke among car salesmen in West German went: ‘Wenn sie rosten, ab in den Osten!’ - ‘If it’s rusty, send it to the East!’
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to ZEITGEIST to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.