Following Wolf Biermann’s expatriation in 1976, the resulting protests mounted by intellectuals and the harsh clamp down by the state, the GDR witnessed its first major wave of departures: by 1983, over 40,000 people had left the country. At the same time, large numbers of artists who remained in the GDR withdrew from the official art scene in their disappointment at the state’s cultural policies.

Artists, intellectuals and also youngsters embarked on a search for free zones, and developed alternative ways of living and new possibilities for creative work: they occupied empty flats and factories and used them as studios or rehearsal rooms, or turned into autonomously run locations for a “breakaway audience”. Consequently, a large number of concerts and readings were held in private settings, while simultaneously official venues such as culture centres were “infiltrated” and used by the alternative scene for exhibitions and performances.

This exhibition takes the thirtieth anniversary of the protests in autumn 1989 as the occasion to present artist’s magazines, mail art projects, and even punk concerts that reveal not only the creative diversity and joy in experimentation, but also the arrogant and destructive incursions by the State Security Service into the art scene.

One major focus of the exhibition are the artist magazines from the museum’s collection, which were created and distributed as forms of “samizdat”, small print runs self-published outside the confines of the GDR’s censorship apparatus. Artistic mail-art projects – postcards as “windows to the world” – were another alternative to the official cultural sector and its regimented stipulations. Exhibition posters, original documents and photographs of locations in Leipzig are used to present a self-determined “second public sphere” in which cultural stakeholders carried out intermedial projects and readings together with authors critical of the system. Various musical trends such as experimental compositions, the free jazz festival in Peitz, street music, punk concerts within the youth subculture and the various relationships between the different stakeholders demonstrate the musical aspect of art and protest in the final decade of the GDR.

The temporary exhibition of the German Museum of Books and Writing was created in collaboration with the German Music Archive of the German National Library and in cooperation with the Institute of Musicology at the University of Leipzig.

More about censorship in the permanent exhibition at the German Museum of Books and Writing.

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