It’s an impressive and rather startling sight in a quiet neighbourhood in the eastern Dutch town of Enschede: a giant statue of former Soviet leader Lenin. But it’s there with a purpose – highlighting an exhibition on daily life in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. “We get tourists here who think Enschede is still a communist stronghold”, museum director Kees van der Meiden told Radio Netherlands.

Listen to a Newsline report here:

The TwentseWelle museum is located in an area that was destroyed by a fireworks plant explosion in 2001, but which has since been rebuilt. Director Kees van der Meiden says the exhibition – titled 'The DDR – Impressions of a Disappeared Republic' – is not simply a nostalgic trip through time.

Daily life
“We want to show how people lived in that country, under very difficult circumstances”, he says. “But it’s not about the military parades, the greyness of the era or the oppressing atmosphere – things which we usually associate with East Germany. There was also a world of culture, of arts, of people going on holidays; they were simply trying to make the best of it. But we never got to know that”.
 

Toys
So the exhibition shows not only the usual artefacts of the era – the Lenin statue, a Trabant car – but also lesser known objects. The exhibtion’s curator, German born Marinus Haas, points at a cabinet of toys, made for East German crèches. “These were standard toys for the children”, he says. “In every crèche they played with the same toys, because that’s how the state system worked. They thought it was very simple to have the same toys everywhere”.
 

Simplicity
Simplicity was clearly the key word in East German design in the 1960s and 1970s, as ordinary objects like cutlery, telephones, toys and furniture in the exhibition show. Objects so ordinary, one might be surprised to see them in a museum, but that’s exactly what Mr Van der Meiden and his curators wanted to achieve – show the day to day life of ordinary East Germans.

The influence of East German culture extended beyond the Berlin Wall. “If you look at the ‘Plattenbau’, the uniform concept of building houses and apartments in the GDR, you can clearly see it has influenced Western concepts like Ikea”, says Mr Van der Meiden. “Ikea builds on the idea of designing your own house, but in a very uniform way. So East Germany, in a way, influenced our daily lives, too”.
 

See a video trailer of the exhibition here: (Story continues below)

The exhibiton runs until 28 February 2010. For more information please visit www.twentsewelle.nl.