The event had already been running for three quarters of an hour when Durs Grünbein asked one of the crucial questions: "Is there actually still a silent exclusion of East German art?" At the time, the accusation that the Dresden State Art Collections coyly hid all of their exhibits created in the GDR in the depot seemed like fuel to the fire.

In Dresden, which was already debating after Pegida, the long overdue discussion about the importance of and East German in reunified Germany flared up, with the controversy over images becoming a kind of proxy discussion for actual and supposed injuries caused by reunification.

Stephen Locke

Correspondent for Saxony and Thuringia based in Dresden.

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The state of affairs was then to be examined two years ago on the thirtieth anniversary of unity, but Corona reduced public exchange to zero.

On Friday evening, the director of the Dresden State Art Collections, Marion Ackermann, from Göttingen, and the Dresden-born writer Durs Grünbein attempted a summary.

This was not possible without once again citing the grossest malice in dealing with art from the GDR, from the Weimar exhibition in 1999, when East German works such as "Degenerate Art" were presented on garbage bags, to art exhibitions on sixty and seventy years of the Federal Republic , in which East German protagonists simply did not appear.

The problem is that the public debate is always about statecraft, said Grünbein.

The cultural landscape of the GDR was more diverse.

"Especially in the last ten years there was also completely different art that testified to a new beginning, which was something completely new, of course not official, but that never played a role in the debates." Ackermann, who had already publicly admitted, "a lot not having known" before she came to Dresden in 2016, referred to the hubris with which it was long discussed that "real" art could only be created in freedom and democracy: "Ninety percent of the art that we preserve is originated in non-democratic systems”, which probably applies to most German museums.

"You don't need a democratic system to create great art."

Pride in the art, not the circumstances

Of course, that doesn't mean being proud of the circumstances, but rather of the art that was created under these circumstances, which in turn was sometimes confused in the East.

Looking at art from the GDR impartially, on the other hand, is a step forward that arose from the image dispute.

Not only can some of the sorely missed works be seen publicly again in Dresden, special exhibitions such as the recent one on “German Design – Two Countries, One History” were curated on an equal footing.

Why it took thirty years for this change to take place became clear once again in the audience discussion.

Artists from the East said that art academies in the GDR always looked to the West, while artists from the West confirmed that the reverse was rarely the case.

After the fall of the Wall, ignorance increased to the point of derogatory: gallery owners who represented East German artists in the 1990s were threatened with losing their stands at Art Cologne and Art Basel if they continued to show up with works from the East.

As far as Grünbein's initial question about the exclusion of Eastern art in today's Germany is concerned, the findings are mixed, even in the thirty-second year after reunification.

In music, for example, "the exclusion is still absolute," said the Dresden conductor and composer Ekkehard Klemm.

He experiences "with great dismay" how little work created in the East is perceived in the West.

At the same time, he told applause how he used to go to GDR art exhibitions to look for artists who were resistant and what "thieving joy" it was to discover them.

Grünbein agreed, but pointed out that there was also an exclusion at the time, namely artists who were absolutely not wanted politically.

A sentence that made it clear