The culture of East Germany varied throughout the years due to the political and historical events that took place in the 20th century, especially as a result of Nazism and Communism. A reflection on the history of arts and culture in East Germany reveals complex relationships between artists and the state, between oppositional and conformist art. In four decades, East Germany developed a distinct culture and produced works of literature, film, visual arts, music, and theatre of international acclaim. Popular culture specialities included among others a high popularity of nudism in Eastern Germany.[1]
In the 1950s the officially encouraged form of art was known as 'Socialist Realism'. This was intended to depict everyday life under Socialism in a way that showed the benefits of living and working in East Germany.
Das Magazin survived the unification of Germany.[3]
The Soviet magazine Sputnik in German was considered too liberal for GDR in 1988.[4]
Music
Pop and rock
Influences from the West were heard everywhere, because TV and radio that came from the Klassenfeind (enemy of the working class) could be received in many parts of the east, too (an exception being the area around Dresden, with its geographically disadvantageous position in the Elbe valley, giving it the nickname of "Valley of the Clueless" despite some Western radio being available). As rock music became increasingly popular around the world following the meteoric rise of bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and others, new bands began forming throughout East Germany. However, fearful of "degenerate Western values [corrupting] the young people who listen to [rock]"[5] as well as rock music's tendency to criticize establishments and governments, GDR officials set out to regulate much of the new music. The steps taken to control music included requiring rock bands to sing entirely in German and produce songs of educational value that promoted socialist ideas.[6] Another problem for the authorities was having to check song texts very carefully for anti-state tendencies. The band Renft, for example, fell foul of the authorities, which eventually led to its being banned and disbanded.[7]
State-sanctioned bands such as Puhdys were given an "Auftrittserlaubnis" (Performance permission) that allowed them to play in East German (and occasionally even West German) clubs, festivals, etc. Failure to obtain this card before a performance could result in the forced separation of a band or even imprisonment.[8] The Puhdys, Stern-Combo Meißen and Karat were popular mainstream bands, managing to hint at critical thoughts in their lyrics without being explicit. Like other mainstream acts, they appeared in youth magazines such as Neues Leben and Das Magazin.
Despite the heavy censorship, regulation, and repression imposed by the GDR leadership over the East German rock community, the government did, to a certain degree, aid the development of the new music. This included allowing the import of illegal instruments via bands that desperately needed foreign equipment,[9] as well as significant airtime given to female artists. The latter allowed for what historians consider growth in the expression of female identity and sexuality.[10] The state also accepted the formation of more "underground" groups with a decisively western-oriented sound. Most notably, a number of punk and new wave bands such as Sandow and Feeling B could produce records with the official company AMIGA.
Schlager, which was very popular in the west, also gained a foothold early on in East Germany, and numerous musicians, such as Gerd Christian[de], Uwe Jensen[de], and Hartmut Schulze-Gerlach[de] gained national fame. Frank Schöbel was very successful. From 1962 to 1976, an international schlager festival was held in Rostock, garnering participants from between 18 and 22 countries each year.[11] The city of Dresden held a similar international festival for schlager musicians from 1971 until shortly before reunification.[12] There was a national schlager contest hosted yearly in Magdeburg from 1966 to 1971 as well.[13]
On a more traditional level, the East German government celebrated the fact that Johann Sebastian Bach was born in East German territory, and spent a great deal of money converting his house in Eisenach into a museum of his life, which, among other things, included more than 300 instruments from Bach's life. In 1980, this museum received more than 70,000 visitors.
Every second year, school children from across East Germany gathered for a Bach competition held in East Berlin. Every four years an international Bach competition for keyboard and strings was held.
German jazz was divided after World War II, with the East German regime having an ambivalent attitude to jazz, which it initially resisted as an American influence on culture,[14] but later accepted as a form of "people's music".[15]
Klaus Lenz directed a number of bands. [16]Manfred Krug sang jazz till his emigration in 1977.
Recording establishments
There were state recording companies. In 1947 Ernst Busch established Eterna Records for classical, folk, jazz and church music. For popular music there was Amiga Records. These operations became state-directed in 1953.[17][18]
Visual art
Artists were members of the Communist "Verband Bildender Künstler der DDR".[19][20]
International Workers' Day was obligatory for millions. The Tag der Republik (the Day of the Republic), 7 October, was the anniversary of the creation of the GDR.
East German theatre was strongly dominated in its early years by Bertolt Brecht, who brought back artists from the antifascist resistance and reopened Theater am Schiffbauerdamm with his Berliner Ensemble. On the other side some streams tried to establish "Pure Workers Theatre", played by workers and performing plays about workers.
Because of censorship, many artists left the GDR from 1975 onwards. A parallel development was that some artists moved out to small city theatres, to create theatre beyond Berlin. For example, Peter Sodann founded the Neues Theater in Halle/Saale and Frank Castorf worked at a theatre in Anklam. Theatre and Cabaret had a very important status for the people in the GDR and it was a very active and dynamic scene. This was the cause of some contention with the state. Benno Besson was quoted as saying about the relationship between cabaret and the state: "At least they took us seriously."
The Friedrichstadt-Palast in Berlin is the last major building erected by the GDR. Here, Berlin's great revue tradition lives on, today bringing viewers state-of-the-art shows.[23]
In East Germany the movie industry was very active. Besides folk movies, the East German movie industry became known worldwide for its productions, especially for its children's movies (Das kalte Herz and cinematic versions of the Grimms' fairy tales, and also modern productions like Das Schulgespenst).
Red Westerns (Indianerfilme) were also made, in which American Indians often took the role of the displaced people. Gojko Mitić is the most famous actor in this role; he often played the righteous, kindhearted and charming Chief (The Sons of Great Bear directed by Josef Mach). He became an honorary chief of the Sioux nation, when he visited the United States of America in the 1990s and the accompanying television crew showed the Sioux one of his movies.
East German cinemas screened domestic productions, Czech, Polish, and other Eastern European productions and some Hollywood movies, although the number of the latter was limited due to the cost of purchasing the licences. Movies which represented or glorified a capitalistic ideology were not shown. For example, Grease was not shown but One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was. Comedies were popular, such as the Danish Olsen Gang or movies with the French comedian Louis de Funès.
Penetration of West German TV reception (grey) in East Germany for channel ARD. Areas with no reception (black) were jokingly referred to as "Valley of the Clueless" (Tal der Ahnungslosen), while ARD was said to stand for "Außer (except) Rügen und Dresden".
As the arrangement of aerials on roofs often revealed viewers that watched West German television, they could be prone to denunciation by patriotic neighbours or FDJ members, especially during the 1950s and 1960s. However, by the 1980s the authorities were largely resigned to the presence of Western broadcasts and even tolerated the existence of communal antennas and cable systems carrying both DFF and Western channels.
The DEFA was one of the largest TV production companies within the German-speaking countries and produced work that occasionally dared to feature covert criticism of the establishment.[25]
Material culture
The material culture of the GDR is the primary focus of Ostalgie (a combination of "Ost" (East) and "Nostalgie" (nostalgia)).
Consumerism
Consumerism is a social and economic order that encourages an acquisition of goods and services in ever-increasing amounts. The GDR's economy produced a whole series of consumer goods and associated consumerist practices different from both West German and Soviet bloc cultures. A consumerist culture developed with (in contrast to the West relatively clear-cut) prestige allocations according to consumerist practices.
In the early days of the GDR, modernist designs predominated. In the wake of the war's destruction, there were several plans to reimagine cities using Bauhaus and other avant-garde designs. Among these was the plan drafted by Hans Scharoun: a collective plan for a new division and decentralization of the then undivided city of Berlin to be enacted under the auspices of the Allied Control Council. Scharoun's vision included residential cells, criss-crossed by open, green boulevards. By the early 1950s, however, the Bauhaus blueprint for reconstruction had fallen out of favor among political elites, and projects in the modernist style stalled or were abandoned. One of the few remaining structures designed in this vein is a Bauhaus apartment block designed by Scharoun himself, in the Friedrichshain neighborhood of Berlin, on an open boulevard formerly known as Stalinallee.
The modernists' loss of popularity was largely attributable to the rise of Socialist Classicism or Stalinist Architecture (German: Zuckerbäckerstil), an eclectic style that weaved together elements of national cultural heritage and traditionalist ornamentation with the comfort of contemporary architecture. What these elements might look like depended on location and varied significantly between projects completed in the various regions of the Eastern Bloc. In the GDR these national elements were usually echoes of classicism, but did allow for regional variations such as the Dresden Altmarkt, which borrows form the Baroque style, or the Brick Gothic-inspired Lange Straße in the northern port city of Rostock. Reacting to a shift in the political and economic exigencies of the time, new designs in the Stalinist style tapered off by the late 1950s. This was largely due to material scarcity; the at times lavish ornamentation of the national style met with increasing disapproval as millions still lived in overpopulated or dilapidated buildings. The advent of de-Stalinisation further suppressed demand for new Socialist Classical projects.
The architectural preferences of the 1960s and 1970s were thus shaped largely by economic necessity. The need for cheap, mass-housing led to the "industrialization of architecture", in which new designs emphasized functionalism and low construction costs. Projects of this type were mostly immense concrete residential blocks, which later included prefabricated components. Although the new functionalism was a response to material scarcity, aesthetically the movement meant a return to modernist principles. Freed from the national ideological framework of Socialist Classicism, architects resurrected the Bauhaus "new buildings" of the 1920s. East German building templates such as the WBS 70, the P2, and the high-rise WHH GT 18/21 exemplify the aesthetic shift towards modernism, but were above all valued for their prefabricated parts that enabled quick and cost-effective construction.
the Alexanderplatz, where much of the GDR buildings still shape the place
the city-centre buildings of Leipzig's Karl-Marx-University (now partly disassembled and partly being replaced by a post-modern building), including the City-Hochhaus Leipzig
East German leaflet, fired across the inner German border
With widespread censorship of literature, the media and the arts, political jokes were one of the main outlets for criticism of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). After reunification, these became known as DDR-Witze (GDR jokes). Political jokes of this form have almost disappeared since reunification as they no longer play the same subversive role, being replaced by open democratic debate, political cartoons and satire.
The GDR citizens referred to some of the more critical jokes as five-year-jokes (i.e., three years prison for the one telling it and two for all who listen and laugh). There is also a morphological reference to "five-year-plan" – in a way, talking about a five-year-joke was a "meta-joke".
East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic, was a country in Central Europe from its formation on 7 October 1949 until its reunification with West Germany on 3 October 1990. Until 1989, it was generally viewed as a communist state and described itself as a socialist "workers' and peasants' state". The economy of this country was centrally planned and state-owned. Although the GDR had to pay substantial war reparations to the Soviets, it became the most successful economy in the Eastern Bloc.
Germany claims some of the most renowned composers, singers, producers and performers of the world. Germany is the largest music market in Europe, and third largest in the world.
The Palace of the Republic was a building in Berlin that hosted the Volkskammer, the parliament of East Germany, from 1976 to 1990.
Peter Schreier was a German tenor in opera, concert and lied, and a conductor. He was regarded as one of the leading lyric tenors of the 20th century.
East German jokes, jibes popular in the former German Democratic Republic, reflected the concerns of East German citizens and residents between 1949 and 1990. Jokes frequently targeted political figures, such as Socialist Party General Secretary Erich Honecker or State Security Minister Erich Mielke, who headed the Stasi secret police. Elements of daily life, such as economic scarcity, relations between the GDR and the Soviet Union, or Cold War rival, the United States, were also common. There were also ethnic jokes, highlighting differences of language or culture between Saxony and Central Germany.
As with many Soviet-allied countries prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the government of the former German Democratic Republic applied censorship during its existence from 1949 to 1990. The censorship was practised through a hierarchical but unofficial censorship apparatus, ultimately controlled by the ruling party (SED). Through censorship, the socialist point of view on society was ensured in all forms of literature, arts, culture and public communication. Due to the lack of an official censorship apparatus, censorship was applied locally in a highly structured and institutionalized manner under the control of the SED.
Rundfunk der DDR was the collective designation for radio broadcasting organized by the State Broadcasting Committee in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) until German reunification in 1990.
German punk includes a body of music and a subculture that have evolved since punk rock became popular in Germany in the 1970s. Within the subculture of punk in Germany, a style of music called Deutschpunk was developed; this style of music has developed distinctly from hardcore punk, and includes lyrics in German as well as a fast tempo. In the punk scene in Germany, some bands play music in the Deutschpunk style, while other German punk bands pursue various other styles of punk music.
The football league system of the German Democratic Republic existed from 1949 until shortly after German reunification in 1991.
Deutscher Fernsehfunk was the state television broadcaster in the German Democratic Republic from 1952 to 1991.
Günter Kochan was a German composer. He studied with Boris Blacher and was a master student for composition with Hanns Eisler. From 1967 until his retirement in 1991, he worked as professor for musical composition at the Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler". He taught master classes in composition at the Academy of Music and the Academy of Arts, Berlin. He was also secretary of the Music Section of the Academy of Arts from 1972 to 1974 and vice-president of the Association of Composers and Musicologists of the GDR from 1977 to 1982. Kochan is one of eleven laureates to have been awarded the National Prize of the GDR four times. In addition, he received composition prizes in the US and Eastern Europe. He became internationally known in particular for his Symphonies as well as the cantata Die Asche von Birkenau (1965) and his Music for Orchestra No. 2 (1987). His versatile oeuvre included orchestral works, chamber music, choral works, mass songs and film music and is situated between socialist realism and avant-garde.
Edmund Collein was an East German architect and urban planner. He is also known for his photography while studying at the Bauhaus art school.
Erika Stürmer-Alex is a German artist whose works include wall paintings, panel paintings, printed graphics, collage sculptures, polyester sculptures and installations.
Friedrich Schenker was a German avant-garde composer and trombone player.
Sibylle was a bimonthly fashion magazine that was published in East Germany and then in Germany from 1956 to 1995. The magazine was subtitled Zeitschrift für Mode und Kultur. It is known as the most famous fashion magazine of East Germany and was called Vogue of East Germany.
Harry Goldschmidt was a Swiss musicologist.
Oktoberklub, initially known as the Hootenanny-Klub Berlin, was a political music group from the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The musical style of the group was a mixture of folk, chanson and rock music. Founded in 1966, the group disbanded in 1990. Occasional performances followed in 2002 and 2007.
Horst Förster was a German conductor, choirmaster, violinist and university teacher. In 1952, he was appointed the youngest General Music Director of the GDR in the Landestheater Eisenach. Afterwards, he was chief conductor of the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Halle and the Singakademie Halle (1956–1964) as well as the Dresden Philharmonic (1964–1966).
Wolfgang Hütt was a German art historian.
Elmar Peter Schwenke is a German educator, musician and writer.
↑ Götz Hintze: Rocklexikon der DDR. 2. Auflage. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2000, ISBN3-89602-303-9, Eintrag zum Internationalen Schlagerfestival Dresden
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