Collection of Everyday Culture of the GDR

The Collection of Everyday Culture of the GDR in Eisenhüttenstadt comprise about 170,000 objects that have been donated by ca. 2000 individuals. The collections broadly represent the everyday material culture of the GDR.

The objects have predominantly entered the collection through private donations. Numerically, the collection is predominantly comprised of private consumer goods, especially household appliances, clothing, furniture, books, magazines, and various image and sound carriers. These include photographs, photo albums, posters, records, and audio tapes. In Eisenhüttenstadt, furniture occupies the most space, claiming almost a third of the depot’s capacity. The museum also collects accompanying materials such as instruction manuals, receipts, private and official documents, as well as information about the usage history of items donated to the museum.

The collection is currently divided into 35 subject groups, from A for “Agitation and Propaganda” to Z for “Means of Payment”. Each object is thereby assigned to a depot area spatially and to a superordinate concept thematically in the inventory catalogs. On-site, the collection can be accessed through an object database as well as directly in the depot.

For research inquiries, please contact:

Britt Scheffler
Phone: 03364 – 505 27 45
Britt.Scheffler@landkreis-oder-spree.de

Collection Evaluation

The expert report on the Collection of Everyday Culture of the GDR was submitted by Elke Kimmel and Doris Müller-Toovey on December 30, 2013. In connection with the change of sponsorship and leadership of the Documentation Center for Everyday Culture of the GDR, discussions were held in 2012/13 about the future role of the Documentation Center within the museum landscape of Brandenburg and Berlin, and the museum and collection concept was to be revised. As an important prerequisite for this, an expert report on the current state of the collection, funded by the federal government, was created by the end of 2013. In addition, recommendations were provided for its future care.

The following quotes are from this expert opinion:

“The documentation center understood itself as a participatory museum: What the donors perceived as worth collecting was collected. In doing so, it clearly distinguished itself from museums that independently search for objects to substantiate certain intentions or specifically cover certain thematic areas.”

“The documentation center possesses a large number of objects from all phases of the GDR. This is a distinctive feature, because objects from the first two decades of the GDR are hardly represented in museum collections to this extent. Particularly in the area of plastic objects, the collection is unique.”

“For the area of private everyday life in the GDR, the collection shows a great density. The inventory of electrical and electronic devices from all phases of the GDR is particularly abundant. Many of these items were among the first to be discarded in the early 1990s, as citizens equipped themselves with more modern Western devices.”

“The problematic depot situation was repeatedly pointed out in the annual reports by the management of the documentation center, concerning both the quantity of depots, their inadequate suitability (in terms of construction, space, and climate), as well as the extremely unfavorable high number of depot relocations for a museum collection.”