From Socialist Realism to Art in Socialism: The Reception of Modernism as an Instigating Force in the Development of Art in the GDR

Abstract

At the last Congress of the GDR’s Artists’ Association in 1988, the term ‘Socialist Realism’ was officially replaced by the phrase ‘Art in Socialism’. The Congress’s participants thus tried not only to do justice to the variety of art, but also to bid farewell to Socialist Realism as an aesthetic concept. But how were these two goals to be accomplished, without changes in the GDR’s institutions and power structures? A solution was possible, because the generation of leftist artists, recruited after 1945 to hold office in the new system and build a new socialist art, had been educated or otherwise active in the 1920s. They wanted to re‐appropriate the left’s modernist traditions, assuming thereby a position opposed to official cultural policy, which required strict accommodation to the Soviet model. This conflict concerning the proper attitude to modern art became the central discourse for the development of art in the GDR.