Re-Imaging the Niche: Visual Reconstructions of Private Spaces in the GDR

Abstract

What did the GDR look like? Or more importantly for this chapter, how do we remember the look of the GDR? For most people, regardless of whether they lived in the GDR or not, this question would probably conjure up visual representations belonging to a well-known stock of media images which, through continuous repetition, have become iconic for the country and central to the production of historical knowledge.¹ Propelled forward by the growing mediatisation of history, a vast bank of images representing the GDR and in particular the fall of the Wall has been created since 1989. As a product of GDR memory discourse, this image arsenal reflects post-We n d e remembrance culture in its division between the political and the private sphere, and between the often institutionally driven focus on the Täterstaat (perpetrator state) on the one hand and, on the other, a broader notion of Alltagsgeschichte (history of the everyday) and the visual representation of the material world of the GDR in private museums (see Chapter 8), in films and on television.