Munich. The fall of the Berlin Wall was without a doubt partly an act of sovereign self-determination on the part of people who were suffering under an absurd configuration of power. However, the pious wish for new impulses for the now-lethargic democracy that made the other Germany into »new Länder« soon dissolved into thin air again. What remains is the stale taste of old clichés that were reactivated despite the temporary feeling of a new start – clichés about the superiority of Western resourcefulness over Eastern backwardness and consequent inability to cope with neo-liberal demands. People in the West at first enjoyed the horrible scene of decline and backwardness compared with their own standards, but soon forgot this kind of romanticism and proceeded to exploit the chances for investment it offered, thus establishing a kind of colonialism in their own country. The hype of the Leipzig schools of painting could also be seen as a consequence of this boom, even though the zenith has probably been reached both here and there.
Peggy Meinfelder, who grew up in the south of the GDR right next to the border fence, dissociates herself clearly from the kind of help and discoveries that in the end only lead to the wealth of the consumer culture being seen as the criteria of freedom. Her work »Westpaket« shows vividly what kind of presents Western benefactors gave to their Eastern relatives, and how the recipients obviously used a strictly formalised distribution of the small quantities of cheap sweets and baking ingredients to try and avoid the feeling of being treated as second-class citizens. In it, she gives an example of how the propagated freedom of the West already concealed its less respectable sides even before the Wall came down.
The new regime’s invitation to take the first steps towards a consumer existence was first seen on a really large scale in the guise of the so-called »welcome money«. For Meinfelder, these »100 West marks« were a sort of key social scene, whose traces she uses to map the symbolic walls between East and West which exist to this day. To examine this occurrence, she presents a large collection of interviews about how people used these one hundred D-marks. In retrospect, many of the things people bought seem barely worth the time spent waiting in line. Some of those involved took the matter much less seriously, however, or didn’t bother with it at all. Otherwise one would have to think that in this moment the majority of the new citizens of the Federal Republic had capitulated or was enticed into surrendering. Most of these objects no longer exist today or represent a sort of consumer junk. A few of them form a small collection that Meinfelder has arranged on a shelf and provided with little labels upon which, as with archaeological finds, the name of the buyer and the reason for deciding to purchase the item are given. More detailed descriptions of the way in which individual interviewees dealt with the situation are given by the voice of a professional speaker.
As a counterpart to this, projected texts appear on the wall showing responses by West Germans to questions about their first experiences with East Germany. While the exhibition visitor now tries to listen and read at the same time, which is of course impossible, the suspicion arises that there are incompatible experiences in play here as well, whose basic irreconcilability is highlighted by the presentation. However, one gleans enough fragments to realise that the short transition period after the fall of the Wall offered space for a variety of experiences, whose potential later somehow petered out.
At any rate, these various points of view make it clear once more that the history of the reunification and the fronts it created are barely being addressed any more in the artistic sphere. Meinfelder insists on the relevance of this topic – an approach that should be followed up.
Translated by Timothy Jones