“How Present is Wall”, reads a white panel installed in a grassy park in Berlin, tightly fit with five other layers styled with the same design. Arranged in a zig-zag, the installation ends with: „How Strong is Border“, „How Liberation is Freedom“. None of them end with question marks.

One thing strikes me the most about this ensemble: the middle panel, which asks or states, „How__is Longing“. It lacks an adjective. The space between interrogative adverb and present tense verb is empty. But do we really need to fill it with one word after all?, I ask myself.

There is a continuous current of longing and yearning that is difficult to keep straight, yet they stick. They inflate the pool of memories and dive in and out between our selves. And there is toughness to reminiscence: longing stays elastic and steady. I like to think that longing holds us in place, gives us a place to dwell. And sometimes, this is mediated by our choices in how we remember what has already long passed. Or perhaps, places around us do the remembering for us and with us.

In 2022, I went to Berlin for my master’s thesis fieldwork to explore the memory-making of the German Democratic Republic, and in particular, the remembrance practices of former political prisoners of STASI and the places that stake a claim on memory: museums and memorials dedicated to the GDR period. In my conversations with former citizens of the GDR, I realised that when the „remembering happens“, the bodies of the Rememberers are continuously moulded. The past is rediscovered again and again, with the temporal boundaries, articulated through the bridging words of „here“ and „there“, helping the memory to narrate itself. Yet, how__is longing for places that produce the memory?

Choose your own mundanity

Memory sites are dead material – they are inherently mute, for they hold no memories of their own until people invest them with meaning. In contemporary debates about GDR memory, there is a marked split: on one hand, material remains underscore a state of injustice. On the other hand, some representations tend to showcase naïve sentimentalizing at best, and, at worst, an intentional banalizing of the GDR past. The German term, Ostalgie embodies the latter, as it is a portmanteau of two German words: ‘East’ and ‘nostalgia’. Yet, Ostalgie is not necessarily about an obsession with the GDR era, but it rather might signify an embattled site of memory-making, where individual experiences and biographies seek legitimacy.

In recent years, there has been a tendency to gloss over the totalitarian past of Germany, reframing the feeling of Ostalgie as a mainstream sentiment. The DDR Museum in Berlin exemplifies this shift. With its approximately 10,000 artifacts – ranging from bottles of kitchen cleansers to speaking windows at the border checkpoints – it presents a collection of mundanity. In a way, it preserves personal memorabilia, but, this type of memorabilia sometimes is emptied of its intimate weight it once carried.

When I was scrolling through the website of the DDR Museum, I saw the little section of how the museum introduces itself as a Looking Glass into a „bygone state“. By describing itself as “unique” and “extraordinary”, it seems that the museum detaches itself from other, seemingly more conventional museums. It states that, history, and in particular, everyday life in the GDR is conveyed in a  “scientifically sound” way, and is also sensorially crafted in a manner that feels accessible, even enjoyable.

Writing a description for the website highlighting the extraordinary character of a venue in order to attract visitors is a conventional example of a marketing strategy aimed at drawing interest. Yet stating that it presents a “scientifically sound” way to engage with the past also lays claim on memory, with the question arising about whose, or which memory is privileged? What does it mean to be “unique”, or “scientifically sound” anyway?

Choose your own DDR

The interface of the website provides users with a huge display of two people sitting in a Trabant car. One of them pointing in the direction of a socialist building seen through the windshield. The museum space itself also showcases a real Trabant car, in which visitors are allowed to sit and undertake a “journey back in the GDR”, along with experiencing the “daily life” while entering rooms of furnished high-rise block towers, taking a seat in front of a small Soviet TV in a reconstructed living room typical to the GDR housing, or looking into reconstructed, “socialist” bedrooms.

Each item in this space had its own history, which created a drifting experience, but it went to places that are fallen into disuse, and disrepair. These are infrastructures that are failing, but failing consistently, and this failure presents itself as somewhat entertaining in the context of the contemporary museum. It is clear it is all staged, for raising an awareness, but mostly, for the purpose of entertainment. The museum almost makes a spectacle out of the grey block buildings and the dull weather, which one can see and “immerse themselves into” when on-site.

The reconstruction of the past in such a straightforward way was worthy of analysis for several reasons: I wanted to see how the museum positions itself in the current memory debate about the German socialist past, especially considering its promise for multisensorial experiences: when the visitors can touch, feel, listen, and truly inhabit the space. Soon, I asked myself whether the museum was building a collective mythology, or an entirely new memory – not ex nihilo but out of a fixed understanding of the past remembrance. Interestingly, it lets you choose what to dwell on, what to contemplate more closely. But doesn’t it also serve as a counter-memory of the past experienced by people who feel their lives were museumified?

One of my respondents once told me he could not bear the boredom of being anymore, that it was all dull, grey and dreary; that life in the GDR had no colours; that buildings had no new windows, that everything was so old and dysfunctional; let alone the greyness of smell – the smoke produced by factories that prevailed the whole East Germany. Yet, in another realm, in the West, people had all the smells and the colours, they had all kinds of fruits. That’s where he tasted Kiwi for the first time after the Fall of Berlin Wall too.

Another woman I talked to tells me in a concerning tone of voice that there were no deep connections among lovers, „it was not love and sex together, but it was just sex, sex, sex. The boredom of it, no theatre and no cinema“. „This endless boredom, it’s something I remember the most“, tells me another respondent, „the scenery was so unbearably boring, even going to the summer houses during holidays, it was so, so boring. No other people around, TV showing nothing interesting. That’s why they drank so much, you know.“

Boredom was a way of living according to people I talked to, and it also served as a state of being – as an antidote to what the West embodied. Yet, I could not see any equivalent of boredom when visiting DDR museum, where I saw the past residues displayed there are presented in a very different way with, life histories – online and offline alike – being commemorated in a way that produces a spectacular effect.

Choose your Fighter  

While reading short informative texts about GDR artifacts, its border-zones, and STASI surveillance, a digital screen caught my attention with the following phrase projected against the background of a Soviet-style wallpaper: THE NEW SOCIALIST HUMAN.

After choosing a field of choice, this type of “interactive game” enabled the visitors to customize a character by choosing a face from four facial expressions. The next step involved selecting clothing for a desired character, again out of four options. In case of “pink socialist human”, there were two dresses and two trousers, aimed at „building“ some kind of GDR persona. Users could also select their desired hairstyle (again, out of four options), top, shoes, hat, jewellery, bag, book, accessory, and a flag symbol. Each section provided a brief information. The category of jewellery stated:

„Have you just been released from prison? Piercing and tattoos have no place in the life of a good Socialist. Rings are to be worn on your fingers and then no more than a wedding ring.“

Once the character was complete, one could print their versions. The objects, such as Trabant cars, bear the legacy of ideology, yet „taking an artificial ride in the GDR landscape for several minutes“ removes such an object from the realm of politics, and such engagement with an artifact from the GDR becomes a source of entertainment. But what about actual „humans that represent Socialism“ as illustrated by the museum? Can the complexity of people living in the GDR be reduced to a game-like understanding of a person as a whole?

This reminds me of the psychoanalyst, Hans Joachim Maaz who made quite a long remark in his work, „Behind the Wall: The Inner Life of Communist Germany“ (1995) about the psychological portrait of the collapsed „existing real socialism“ of the GDR. He boldly stresses the „dysfunctional traits“ of East Germans, noting that „the East German personality suffered from the „deficiency syndrome“: deprived of everything from good service to clean air to unconditional love, East Germans invariably blocked instinctive emotional responses and often channelled them into dysfunctional outlets, such as overeating, drinking, smoking, and watching television“. This is quite a risky and stigmatised statement to make, let alone calling „overeating“ (whatever that might contain and however this data was collected statistically), „drinking, smoking and watching television“ a dysfunctional trait.

There is also a universalised term in some disciplines within social sciences, reducing a whole generation to the description of Homo Sovieticus, which also makes me question how these bodies are constructed within the ever-present gaze of Us onto Them. And what about the digital Socialist bodies that we stumble upon from time to time? Reducing the trope of a socialist persona to merely four options, as the little screen indicated, might also be due to the museum’s intention of reconstructing the stereotype of Soviet propaganda by offering „fun and rich“ experience of building a new Socialist human within its cultural and political policies. However, considering the complexity of these individuals, this type of reconstruction might have a dual nature: while intending to showcase Socialist stereotypes, this representation becomes disconnected from the actual owners of their political or cultural bodies, or even, personal life-stories they might be embodying. In other words, it becomes a stigma reinforced by stigma.

This digital screen, regardless of what it carries, serves as a memory carrier. It does create a unified narrative, and it is exclusive of the complex memorabilia of bodies, digital or lived. And it does create new memory site of its own, some kind of an artificial fabric from which we choose our fighters, we build them, we play the game and we make a journey in a somewhat bygone space full of failures.