Latest events at the DDR Museum

Thomas Mann called the anti-communism the “Basic foolishness of our epoch”. By that, he didn’t mean the rejection of anti-communism that he shared, but the blind hate that had made an alliance between democrats and communists against the Nazis impossible. However, did the anti-communism actually blind people, or made them seeing? Wolfgang Wippermann traces back the ideology’s history of anti-communism that is still up to date.

“The state security service was my Eckermann” Wolf Biermann once sang. By that, he meant Goethe’s secretary who followed the master with a notepad and wrote down his sayings for the posterity. The state security service left an almost inexhaustible material about authors from the East and the West in its archive. Through the glasses of its security mania it left a strangely distorted but often detailed picture of Günter Grass. The radio journalist Kai Schlüter has made the effort to reprocess and publish this material.

In 1980, several teenagers attract attention in Weimar with their provocative graffitis (documented in the book “Macht aus dem Staat Gurkensalat”). Some of them get to West Berlin. However, they cannot stop thinking about the Wall. In 1986, they start an art action and draw a white line on the boundary wall. By that, they want to draw attention to the brutal nature of the border barrier. One of the actors is deported in the East and ends up in the state security service prison. The two editors Anne Hahn and Frank Willmann present pictures, documents and texts about the art action. Afterwards, they will be pleased to be at your disposal for further discussion.