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PAINTING

Paintings for the proletariat

With the world’s financial markets currently giving capitalism a bad name, David Wroe dons his Che Guevara t-shirt and heads to a new Berlin exhibition showing forgotten East German art.

Published: 30 September 2008 15:08 CEST
Paintings for the proletariat
Photo: Penny Bradfield

It is perhaps the final humiliation for communism that so many of its iconic 20th century images have been recycled as retro-chic consumer goods.

These days, French teenagers sport Che Guevara t-shirts, German fashion designers fetishize the leftist terrorist outfit RAF, and American tourists buy fake Soviet fur hats bearing the hammer and sickle as they search for remnants of the Berlin Wall.

Entrepreneurs riding this wave of commercial left-wing enthusiasm include Guido Sand and Daniel Helbig, who last year opened a communist-themed hotel in Berlin. Now the two former East German circus performers have just unveiled their latest project for the proletariat, the Volkseigentum art gallery featuring works by leading East German artists not seen in Berlin since reunification.

The collection, which opened this Saturday in the German capital, includes a Berlin cityscape by Gottfried Richter that Raisa Gorbachev gave to East Germany’s Erich Honecker during a state visit, and paintings by Walter Womacka. Said to have been Honecker’s favourite painter, Womacka created the well known frieze on the Haus des Lehrers at Alexanderplatz.

Click here for a photo gallery of the exhibition.

Sand, a bouncy little man who spent 20 years as a trampolinist, explained that he and Helbig were moved to open the gallery by their hotel guests’ hunger for experiencing the flavour of the communist East. They approached the Beeskow Archive in Brandenburg and chose 166 paintings and 30 sculptures using gut feeling based on their own memories of life in East Germany, rather than with the expert eyes of art historians.

“These are my memories of the GDR and I want to bring my memories so people can look and see that it wasn’t all bad and all shit, that we had not only ugly things but some beauty too,” Sand explained.

How much beauty there is in the paintings will be debated, but personal approach taken by Sand and Helbig brings one indubitable strength: the collection is rich in intimate detail. That the paintings show the East’s penchant for nudity and mullet hairstyles is as illuminating as the more predictable themes of socialist industrial progress and rural utopia.

Indeed, Sand’s favourite work – he doesn’t even know the name of the artist – goes beyond the typical German Ostalgie, which is a play on words for eastern nostalgia. The triptych shows a naked couple preparing for a party, then attending the party still mostly naked and, finally, the man alone on the street, clothed and looking hapless. The painting reminded him of his parents, Sand said.

To make up for their haphazard approach, they have hired art historian Dr. Simone Tippach-Schneider to act as curator of the exhibit. But Sand and Helbig evidently had good judgement, for there are some important and valuable pieces in the collection, she said. Most noteworthy is “The Worker” by Walter Womacka – a mesmerizing propaganda piece showing a radiant young man turning over in his mind the glorious mathematic possibilities of Marx’s theories, while before him sits a bright green apple representing paradise.

The sheer lack of subtlety in much of the work is breathtaking. The exceptions are the handful of subversive paintings from the latter days of East Germany, which naturally needed to be so subtle that their meanings could be defended as innocent. One such example is “Waiting” by Heino Koschitzki, a genuinely moving painting in which a row of people wait at a tram stop, staring over the leafless trees as a new dawn threatens to break.

“You could never say these things directly, so they said them through these metaphors,” Tippach-Schneider explained.

Perhaps the pièce de résistance is a portrait of Honecker shaking hands with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev which, if not quite as striking as the famous photograph in which the two leaders greeted by kissing one another on the lips, is a grand work nonetheless.

More information

Volkseigentum, Museum for GDR Art, is open 10 am to 10 pm daily.

Spandauer Straße 2

10178 Berlin

Tel.: 030/2576 8660

Entry is €8, or €6 for reduced concession. Children six and under are free.

For members

DISCOVER GERMANY

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

With thousands of years of history in Germany to explore, you’re never going to run out of museums to scratch the itch to learn about and fully experience the world of the past.

Published: 5 April 2024 10:46 CEST
Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

Here are eight of our favourite museums across Germany’s 16 states for you to discover for yourself. 

Arche Nebra

Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt

One day, around 1600 BCE, local Bronze Age peoples buried one of their most precious objects – the Nebra Sky Disk, a copper, gold, and bronze disk that acted as a calendar to help them plant crops. This was a matter of life and death at the time. 

Over three thousand years later, in 1999, it was uncovered by black market treasure hunters, becoming Germany’s most significant archaeological find. 

While the Sky Disk itself is kept in the (really very good)  State Museum of Pre- and Early History in nearby Halle, the site of the discovery is marked by the Arche Nebra, a museum explaining prehistoric astronomy and the cultural practices of the people who made it. 

Kids will love the planetarium, explaining how the disk was used. 

Atomkeller Museum

Halgerloch, Baden-Württemberg

From the distant to the very recent past – in this case, the Nazi atomic weapons programme. Even as defeat loomed, Nazi scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

While this mainly took place in Berlin, an old beer cellar under the town of Halgerloch, south of Stuttgart, was commandeered as the site of a prototype fission reactor. 

A squad of American soldiers captured and dismantled the reactor as the war ended. Still, the site was later turned into a museum documenting German efforts to create a working reactor – one that they could use to develop a bomb.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a physicist to understand what they were trying to do here, as the explanatory materials describe the scientist’s efforts in a manner that is easy to understand. 

German National Museum

Nuremberg, Bavaria

Remember that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where an unnamed government official wheels the Ark of the Covenant into an anonymous government warehouse? This could possibly be the German equivalent – albeit far better presented. 

The German National Museum was created in 1852 as a repository for the cultural history of the German nation – even before the country’s founding. In the intervening 170 years, it’s grown to swallow an entire city block of Nuremberg, covering 60,000 years of history and hundreds of thousands of objects. 

If it relates to the history of Germany since prehistoric times, you’re likely to find it here.

Highlights include several original paintings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, the mysterious Bronze Age ‘Gold Hats’, one of Europe’s most significant collections of costuming and musical instruments, and a vast display of weapons, armour and firearms. 

European Hansemuseum

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

In the late Middle Ages, the political and economic centre of the world was focused on the North Sea and the Baltic German coasts. 

This was the domain of the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading alliances in human history. Centuries before the Dutch and British East India Companies, they made in-roads to far-flung corners.

The European Hansemuseum in the former Hanseatic city of Lübeck tells the story of the league’s rise and eventual fall, its day-to-day operations, and its enduring legacy.

This museum is fascinating for adults and kids. It uses original artefacts and high-tech interactive elements to tell tales of maritime adventure. Younger visitors will also be enchanted by the museum’s augmented reality phone app that asks them to help solve mysteries. 

Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum

Augsburg, Germany

The Hanseatic League was not the only economic power in the late Middle Ages. The Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg may have been the richest in the world until the 20th century.

From humble beginnings, both families grew to become incredibly powerful moneylenders, funding many of the wars of the 16th century and the conquest of the New World.

The Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum not only explains the rise of both patrician families but also the practices that led to their inconceivable wealth—including, sadly, the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The museum also documents the short-lived Welser colony in Venezuela, which, if it had survived, could have resulted in a very different world history.

This museum has many high tech displays, making it a very exciting experience for moguls of any age.

Teutoburg Forest Museum

Kalkriese, Lower Saxony

Every German child learns this story at some point: One day at the end of summer 9 AD, three legions of the Roman army marched into the Teutoburg forest… and never came out. 

Soldiers sent after the vanished legions discovered that they had been slaughtered to a man.

Arminius, a German who had been raised as a Roman commander, had betrayed the three legions to local Germanic tribes, who ambushed them while marching through the forest. 

Today, the probable site of the battle – we can’t entirely be sure – is marked by a museum called the Varusschlacht Museum (Literally ‘Varus Battle Museum’, named after the loyal Roman commander). 

The highlights here are the finds – made all the more eerie by the knowledge that they were looted and discarded from the legionaries in the hours following the ambush. 

German Romanticism Museum

Frankfurt, Hesse

The Romantic era of art, music and literature is one of Germany’s greatest cultural gifts to the world, encompassing the work of poets such as Goethe and Schiller, composers like Beethoven and artists in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich.

Established in 2021 next to the house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, the German Romanticism Museum is the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Romantic movement. 

In addition to artefacts from some of the greatest names in German romanticism, in 2024, you’ll find a major exhibition exploring Goethe’s controversial 1774 novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, and another on the forest as depicted as dark and dramatic in the art of the period. 

Gutenberg Castle

Haßmersheim, Baden-Württemberg

Sometimes being a smaller castle is a good thing. The relatively small size and location of Guttenburg Castle, above the River Neckar near Heilbronn, protected it from war and damage over eight hundred years – it’s now the best preserved Staufer-era castle in the country.

While the castle is still occupied by the Barons of Gemmingen-Guttenberg, the castle now also contains a museum, that uses the remarkably well-preserved castle interiors to explore centuries of its history – and the individuals that passed through it.

After you’ve explored the museum—and the current exhibition that uses Lego to document life in the Middle Ages —it’s also possible to eat at the castle’s tavern and stay overnight!

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