Excess, Distortion, and Archival Value: Exhibiting the East German Everyday at the Wende Museum

Abstract

This paper argues for the significance of East Germany’s Alltagsgeschichte (everyday history) as both a source of information about the past and as a means to nuance popular conceptions of the Cold War-era’s communist Germany. Its focus on the Wende Museum, a private non-profit archive and museum of Cold War culture located in Culver City, California, addresses the bridge that such an institution can make between popular and scholarly understandings of the Cold War. Considering the significance that location has had on the narrating of the East German past, as well as the impact of new ways of historicizing objects that embrace ambiguity and uncertainty, this paper uses the Wende Museum as an allegory for the benefits that open-ended collections can offer into how history is made and remade. Keywords: East Germany, German Democratic Republic, Cold War, everyday history, Alltagsgeschichte , material culture, memory, archive, museums, Wende.