Culture of East Germany

Influences from the West were heard everywhere, because TV and radio that came from the Klassenfeind (enemy of the working class) could be received in many parts of the east, too (an exception being the area around Dresden, with its geographically disadvantageous position in the Elbe valley, giving it the nickname of "Valley of the Clueless" despite some Western radio being available). As rock music became increasingly popular around the world following the meteoric rise of bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and others, new bands began forming throughout East Germany. However, fearful of "degenerate Western values [corrupting] the young people who listen to [rock]"[5] as well as rock music's tendency to criticize establishments and governments, GDR officials set out to regulate much of the new music. The steps taken to control music included requiring rock bands to sing entirely in German and produce songs of educational value that promoted socialist ideas.[6] Another problem for the authorities was having to check song texts very carefully for anti-state tendencies. The band Renft, for example, fell foul of the authorities, which eventually led to its being banned and disbanded.[7]

State-sanctioned bands such as Puhdys were given "Auftrittserlaubnis" (Performance Permission) that granted them the ability to play in East German (and occasionally even West German) clubs, festivals, etc. Failure to obtain this card before a performance could result in the forced separation of a band or even imprisonment.[8] The Puhdys, Stern-Combo Meißen and Karat were popular mainstream bands, managing to hint at critical thoughts in their lyrics without being explicit. Like other mainstream acts, they appeared in youth magazines such as Neues Leben and Das Magazin. Despite the heavy censorship, regulation, and repression exercised by GDR leadership over the East German rock community, the government did, to a certain degree aid the development of the new music. This included the allowance of illegal instrument importation via bands that desperately needed foreign equipment[9] as well as significant airtime given to female artists. The latter allowed for what historians consider growth in the expression of female identity and sexuality.[10] The state also accepted the formation of more "underground" groups with a decisively western-oriented sound. Most notably, a number of punk and new wave bands such as Sandow and Feeling B could produce records with the official company AMIGA. Several East German rock stars left the GDR. Nina Hagen who published her first hit Du hast den Farbfilm vergessen in 1974 emigrated in 1976. Veronika Fischer emigrated in 1981.

Schlager, which was very popular in the west, also gained a foothold early on in East Germany, and numerous musicians, such as Gerd Christian, Uwe Jensen, and Hartmut Schulze-Gerlach gained national fame. Frank Schöbel was very successful. From 1962 to 1976, an international schlager festival was held in Rostock, garnering participants from between 18 and 22 countries each year.[11] The city of Dresden held a similar international festival for schlager musicians from 1971 until shortly before reunification.[12] There was a national schlager contest hosted yearly in Magdeburg from 1966 to 1971 as well.[13]

Several prestigious ensembles had roots in the pre-War period. Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra was led by Kurt Masur since 1970. The Staatskapelle Dresden was led by Herbert Blomstedt since 1975. Jean Kurt Forest established the Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Chamber Orchestra in 1969, and Hartmut Haenchen led the ensemble.

Other ensembles located in East Germany included the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, the Berlin State Opera, the Komische Oper Berlin, the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Konzerthausorchester Berlin (Berliner Symphony Orchestra) and the Staatskapelle Halle.

On a more traditional level, the East German government celebrated the fact that Johann Sebastian Bach was born in East German territory, and spent a great deal of money converting his house in Eisenach into a museum of his life, which, among other things, included more than 300 instruments from Bach's life. In 1980, this museum received more than 70,000 visitors.

In Leipzig, an enormous archive with recordings of all of Bach's music was compiled, along with many historical documents and letters both to and from him. Werner Neumann founded the Bach-Archiv Leipzig in 1950.

Every second year, school children from across East Germany gathered for a Bach competition held in East Berlin. Every four years an international Bach competition for keyboard and strings was held.

Thomanerchor recorded a number of Bach's works.

German jazz was divided after World War II, with the East German regime having an ambivalent attitude to jazz, which it initially resisted as an American influence on culture,[14] but later accepted as a form of "people's music".[15]

Klaus Lenz directed a number of bands. [16] Manfred Krug sang jazz till his emigration in 1977.

There were state recording companies. In 1947 Ernst Busch established Eterna Records for classical, folk, jazz and church music. For popular music there was Amiga Records. These operations became state-directed in 1953.[17][18]

Statues of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Marx-Engels-Forum, Berlin

Political propaganda shaped GDR - monuments of Communist leaders including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, banners with political slogans.

Critical feminist artists were Gabriele Stötzer, Tina Bara, Cornelia Schleime, Doris Ziegler, Mita Schamal, Karla Woisnitza, Christine Schlegel, Else Gabriel, Yana Milev, Angela Hampel, Gundula Schulze Eldowy, Janet Grau.[21][22]

Consumerism is a social and economic order that encourages an acquisition of goods and services in ever-increasing amounts. The GDR's economy produced a whole series of consumer goods and associated consumerist practices different from both West German and Soviet bloc cultures. A consumerist culture developed with (in contrast to the West relatively clear-cut) prestige allocations according to consumerist practices.

Strausberger Platz in East Berlin

Prager Straße in Dresden in 1972

In the GDR's nascent stages, modernist designs predominated. In the wake of the war's destruction, there were several plans to reimagine cities using Bauhaus and other avant-garde designs. Among these was the plan drafted by Hans Scharoun, a collective plan for a new division and decentralization of the then undivided city of Berlin to be enacted under the auspices of the Allied Control Council. Scharoun's vision included residential cells, criss-crossed by open, green boulevards. As the early 1950s, however, the Bauhaus blueprint for reconstruction had fallen out of favor among political elites, and projects in the modernist style stalled or were abandoned. One of the few remaining structures designed in this vein is a Bauhaus apartment block designed by Scharoun himself, located in the Friedrichshain neighborhood of Berlin, on an open boulevard formerly known as Stalinallee.

The modernists' loss of popularity was largely attributable to the rise of Socialist Classicism or Stalinist Architecture (German: Zuckerbäckerstil), an eclectic style that weaved together elements of national cultural heritage and traditionalist ornamentation with the comfort of contemporary architecture. What these elements might look like depended on location and varied significantly between projects completed in the various regions of the Eastern Bloc. In the GDR these national elements were usually echoes of classicism, but did allow for regional variations such as the Dresden Altmarkt, which borrows form the baroque style, or the Brick Gothic inspired Lange Straße in the northern port city of Rostock. Reacting to a shift in the political and economic exigencies of the time, new designs in the Stalinist style tapered off by the late 1950s. This was largely due material scarcity; the at times lavish ornamentation of the national style was met with increasing disapproval as millions still lived in overpopulated or dilapidated buildings. The advent of de-Stalinisation further suppressed demand for new Socialist Classical projects.

The architectural preferences of the 1960s and 1970s were thus shaped largely by economic necessity. The need for cheap, mass-housing led to the "industrialization of architecture", by which process new designs emphasized functionalism and low construction costs. Projects of this type were mostly immense concrete residential blocks, which later included prefabricated components. Although the new functionalism was the response to material scarcity, aesthetically the movement meant a return to modernist principles. Freed from the national ideological framework of Socialist Classicism, architects resurrected the Bauhaus "new buildings" of the 1920s. East-German building templates such as the WBS 70, the P2, and the high-rise WHH GT 18/21 exemplify the aesthetic shift towards modernism, but were above all valued for their prefabricated parts that enabled quick and cost-effective construction.

Notable examples of GDR architecture are / were:

• the Karl-Marx-Allee, originally Stalinallee, with the Strausberger Platz in East Berlin
• the Prager Straße in Dresden
• the Palace of the Republic
• the Alexanderplatz, where much of the GDR buildings still shape the place
• the city-centre buildings of Leipzig's Karl-Marx-University (now partly disassembled and partly being replaced by a post-modern building), including the City-Hochhaus Leipzig

East German leaflet, fired across the inner German border