Blog

The German pork roast gets its individual flavour from special curing and smoking and is said to be named after the master butcher Cassel, who lived in Berlin in the 19th century. This pork roast (Kasselerbraten) was widespread and popular in the GDR. Read more

The Soviet Occupation Zone, later the GDR, was considerably shaped by the policies of the Soviet Union and the personality cult of Stalin. However, with the succession of Nikita Khrushchev came the process of so-called »de-Stalinisation«. In this blog post, you will find out what this process looked like and how it changed the GDR. Read more

Every now and again I search through the internet for foreign language offers for those who are interested in German history and especially in GDR history. Sometimes I find some, sometimes not. Today I was once again successful. This time I found something interest about German history in general. Read more

Do you actually know our quiz for students? Whether during a group visit as additional task or complementary after a guided tour – the questionnaire is the ideal companion for visiting the exhibition with your students. Read more

Many people know this dish under the name of Königsberg meatballs, too. This dish of minced meat was not only known and popular in East Prussia, but one could find it also on the plates of the GDR citizens. According to a survey of the Forsa institute the Königsberg meatballs have with 93% the highest profile under the local dishes in Germany! Read more

Since 1976 the History Workshop Journal is one of the world’s leading historical journals. It is part of the Oxford University Press. On the homepage of the journal you find a lot of interesting articles and essays. Most of them aren’t free and you can only read the abstracts. But, I found an essay which you can read completely for free. Read more

The original GDR hunter's schnitzel is probably one of the most famous GDR dishes. It consists of breaded hunting sausage and was served with tomato sauce and pasta. We have prepared the hunter's schnitzel according to GDR recipes for you. Read more

Seventy years ago, right after the end of the war in 1945, the Dresdner electrical engineer Heinz Hummel launched his own small business. Using stock material of the German Armed Forces, other suitable material and his improvisation skills, he created initially a flashlight out of a hand dynamo-drive and later a record player under the brand name “Dynamos”. People started to enjoy listening to music again. In the first year of the GDR the disc production (at the beginning mainly shellac discs) increased speedly, and especially the demand of portable music players in “suitcase” boomed. Read more

Researching online after interesting pages or institutions for foreign-speaking people regarding the GDR I found an interesting essay about the early history of the GDR. Read more

During the first year after the war, the governance had to undertake special strategies in order to increase the industrial production and economy. The dammages caused by the war casted industrial zones into poverty. Many workers, especially men, were still in war captivity. In the East, a large number of infrastructure´s investements of Soviet occuping force were unthinkable. Therefore it was important to make the most out of the available resources.  Read more

A few weeks ago I presented here the book “Beyond the Wall. Art and Artifacts from the GDR”. The book was published by the Wende Museum in LA and so I started some research. I want to know what a museum this is that so far away from Germany and the Eastern bloc deals with the artifacts and the history of these countries. Read more

To increase the productivity of industry and the economy in the early years of the GDR, the Soviet Stakhanov movement from the 1930s served as a model for the GDR’s activist movement. Here are some thematic objects from the collection of the DDR Museum. Read more

As Lothar Schubert in December 1984 wrote the rules of a new game, he didn’t guess yet, that his work would be published first 30 years later. Now everybody can play it on his smartphone or in the DDR Museum. Read more

The GDR cruise ship »Völkerfreundschaft« represented East German holidaymakers' dreams from 1960 to 1985. For the majority of the population, however, the GDR's dream ship remained just that – a dream. Read more

In this article we tell you five suprising facts about the end of the German Democratic Republic. Read more

Transistorisation! Magic Word of the 60s in the GDR. Also fixed in the radio and television industry of Central Germany under the state scheme. Read more

Ok, Silly had ever since the middle of the 1980ies arrived in the upper league of the GDR rock music with the Amiga album “Bataillon d’Amour” (1986), but there they weren’t the only ones. Unique though was their sound, which differentiated for the first time from the mainstream in the GDR. The drawers were too small for them. At least since Werner Karma assumed the overall control, the writing, it was clear, that here wouldn’t sung about dying swans, but rather the trouble’s brewing of dying cities, how he framed it. Read more

From Minol-Pirol and Fewa-Johanna to Korbine-Früchtchen: Despite their comparatively short »period of use«, almost everyone who lived in the GDR knows them. With the help of numerous posters, figures and displays from the DDR Museum’s collection, we give an overview of the history of advertising in the GDR. Read more

The Cold War functioned yet as a model for numerous games, which addressed the struggle of East and West and the danger in the form of the atomic bomb. Because of that we present two games with the same title, one of them you can find in the DDR Museum. Read more

When sixtynine years ago the pain of the humanity under the Second World War had an end, in Germany, whose Nazi rulers had caused the catastrophe, the people spoke from the year 1945 as the “Zero Hour”. Thus, as if you could begin to furnish the bombed out flat in the house Europe now from scratch, totally new and totally amicably as a refuge of peace. Just no look back. Read more