Focus DDR - a contemporary exhibition

The exhibition “Focus GDR” presents an interesting and well curated range of unique objects from the German Historical Museum’s collections that vividly illustrate many of the official GDR abbreviations. While they may be familiar to many Germans, I am still amazed at observing the way a whole city/ country of people lived according to such strict dogma - but perhaps if they knew nothing else, it was probably not even an issue for them. But it does seem that it was pretty important to belong to the prevailing political party. The giant busts of Marx and Lenin were omnipresent and seemed to align education and ideology with the communist party of the Soviet Union. There seems to be a shared glorification of the working classes, while the elite political leaders maintained a private lifestyle visiting hunting lodges and appreciating the benefits of a more western lifestyle. The People's Police (Deutsche Volkspolizei) were responsible for protecting the public against criminal offenses and for maintaining socialist conditions. Locally, the police checked the house book of every household - where inhabitants and guests had to be faithfully recorded each night. The Stasi, or Ministry for State Security (Ministerium fuer Staatsicherheit) were both the domestic secret service and the foreigh intelligence service - apparently their focus was to secure the rule of the (only) political party and therefore they kept the entire population under surveillance - but to complement the 90,000 full time Stasi, there were 189,000 unofficial informers who secretly reported on all areas of society. It was bizarre to see the olympic athletes parade in their tracksuits, showing pride in their country, but hiding the almost official doping practices.

It was interesting that the motorisation of the population was not a high priority and therefore the production of vehicles lagged behind the demand. Families had to wait up to 15 years for a delivery of a Wartburg or Trabant, but they required so much petrol and were so polluting, they have not survived much beyond the 1990's. So it really felt like a glimpse into history, but it was not that long ago!