Neil MacGregor and East Germany’s contribution to cultural history
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Version 0 of 1. To open his article on German culture (Made in Germany, Review, 27 September), Neil MacGregor highlights a wetsuit used by someone attempting to flee East Germany. This is the equivalent of exhibiting a hood used by British troops in their maltreatment of Northern Irish and Iraqi prisoners as an icon of British culture. He also equates the two German dictatorships by writing of the “situation under both the Nazis and the Stasi”. It needs to be stated unequivocally that the Nazis were the government of 1930s Germany, imprisoning tens of thousands of political dissidents, torturing and murdering hundreds of thousands of others in concentration camps for racial and political reasons. The regime also carried out a cultural witch-hunt, burning books and demonising “decadent” artists. The Stasi did not run the GDR, it was merely a very powerful security apparatus, but always under the control of the Socialist Unity party. It did not imprison thousands or torture its perceived enemies, even if it was often heavy-handed and unjust. MacGregor also reiterates the incredible, often used, but unsubstantiated claim that “one in three of the population were informing on their friends” to the Stasi. The GDR was a socialist state, even if centrally and bureaucratically governed, and most people lived their lives with little or no relations or connection with the state security services. MacGregor also writes about Meissen in the same distorted vein: “so the factory set up by August the Strong received commissions to make official portraits of the leaders of the communist East German state”. The factory’s main role in the GDR continued to be to produce traditional first-class Dresden porcelain; it did indeed make small ceramic medallions, but mostly commemorating German cultural figures like Goethe, Lessing and Schiller, and extremely few of communist figures.John GreenLondon • Two of the iconic cultural figures mentioned in Neil MacGregor’s article, Ernst Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz, were celebrated and promoted in the GDR (East Germany), although the former was a committed Christian and the latter a pacifist. I hope the new exhibition in the British Museum and the BBC series accompanying it will not simply ignore the contribution made to German culture by the GDR, as is usually done. After all, two of the greatest theatre men of the 20th century, Bertolt Brecht and the Austrian opera director Walter Felsenstein, worked and produced some of their best works there and were supported and heavily subsidised by the government. And Heiner Müller, one of Germany’s best modern dramatists, was a GDR citizen. The country’s orchestras, under conductors like Kurt Masur, were world-famous for the excellence of their music-making; the renowned tenor Peter Schreier and baritone Olaf Bär also learned their handiwork there. This welcome exhibition should be an opportunity to reassess German culture, but without the distorting lenses of the cold war.Bruni de la MotteAberystwyth • Neil MacGregor chose a great symbol of postwar Germany, women clearing up the rubble after the war (Trümmerfrauen). As he says, the particular rubble of Dresden was caused by British and US bombing, killing civilians and the city’s phenomenal cultural heritage. Later the Soviet army arrived in a devastated Dresden and, writes MacGregor “removed the entire art collection”. Plunderers and thieves? In fact all the treasures the Soviet soldiers had found hidden in cellars and water-logged tunnels, often badly packed and damaged, were returned to Dresden in 1956, restored to their former glory by masters in the Soviet Union – including the priceless Sistine Madonna. That should be remembered too.Georgia KallaLondon |