Culture of East Germany
The culture of East Germany varied throughout the years due to the political and historical events that took place in the 20th century, especially as a result of Nazism and Communism.
In four decades, East Germany developed a distinct culture and produced works of literature, film, visual arts, music, and theatre of international acclaim.
This was intended to depict everyday life under Socialism in a way that showed the benefits of living and working in East Germany.
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.
[8] The Puhdys, Stern-Combo Meißen and Karat were popular mainstream bands, managing to hint at critical thoughts in their lyrics without being explicit.
Despite the heavy censorship, regulation, and repression imposed by the GDR leadership over the East German rock community, the government did, to a certain degree, aid the development of the new music.
This included allowing the import of illegal instruments via bands that desperately needed foreign equipment,[9] as well as significant airtime given to female artists.
Most notably, a number of punk and new wave bands such as Sandow and Feeling B could produce records with the official company AMIGA.
Jean Kurt Forest established the Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach Chamber Orchestra in 1969, and Hartmut Haenchen led the ensemble.
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.
East German theatre was strongly dominated in its early years by Bertolt Brecht, who brought back artists from the antifascist resistance and reopened Theater am Schiffbauerdamm with his Berliner Ensemble.
For example, Peter Sodann founded the Neues Theater in Halle/Saale and Frank Castorf worked at a theatre in Anklam.
Movies about the persecution of Jews in the Third Reich, such as Naked Among Wolves, Jakob the Liar, and the resistance against fascism, such as Fünf Patronenhülsen, (both directed by Frank Beyer), became internationally famous.
Gojko Mitić is the most famous actor in this role; he often played the righteous, kindhearted and charming Chief (The Sons of Great Bear directed by Josef Mach).
One of the most well-known film critics in East Germany was Renate Holland-Moritz [de], also known as "Kino-Eule" ("Kino-Owl"), who wrote for the satirical Eulenspiegel magazine.
As the arrangement of aerials on roofs often revealed viewers that watched West German television, they could be prone to denunciation by patriotic neighbours or FDJ members, especially during the 1950s and 1960s.
The DEFA was one of the largest TV production companies within the German-speaking countries and produced work that occasionally dared to feature covert criticism of the establishment.
[26] The material culture of the GDR is the primary focus of Ostalgie (a combination of "Ost" (East) and "Nostalgie" (nostalgia)).
The GDR's economy produced a whole series of consumer goods and associated consumerist practices different from both West German and Soviet bloc cultures.
By 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.
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.
This was largely due to material scarcity; the at times lavish ornamentation of the national style met with increasing disapproval as millions still lived in overpopulated or dilapidated buildings.
The need for cheap, mass-housing led to the "industrialization of architecture", in which new designs emphasized functionalism and low construction costs.
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: With widespread censorship of literature, the media and the arts, political jokes were one of the main outlets for criticism of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).
