For several weeks in the fall of 1989, Leipzig and Berlin, and in particular the district of Prenzlauer Berg, stood at the center of both national and international media attention. Journalists from all over the world reported from the Gethsemane church and the Bornholmer Straße border crossing, two prominent sites in a peaceful revolution then underway.
As early as the 1970s, the Prenzlauer Berg section of East Berlin was home to a small but lively array of countercultures and subcultures. Artists, literati, dropouts, dissidents, and other intellectuals quite intentionally chose Prenzlauer Berg since it provided them with relative safe harbor to form and live their lives the way they desired. They met other like-minded people and formed loose circles of friends and joined church groups where existed a sense of common opposition to the lack of intellectual free space inside the GDR and the SED (Socialist Unity party of Germany) state’s claim to omnipotence.
The focus of this exhibition is not so much on the big, historical events. Rather, it takes up themes, processes and events that moved people in Prenzlauer Berg and to which they reacted. Within the context of the events coming to a head in Central and Eastern Europe during the 1980s, including the GDR, the exhibit depicts the daily life and describes the dreams and at times utopian visions held by those living in Prenzlauer Berg. At the center of this narrative are the years 1989/90 – an obvious historical turning point. Many of the conflicts surrounding the goal of political self-determination, environmental protection, education, urban renewal, the failed economic system and social responsibility – subjects passionately debated prior to the fall of the Wall – also triggered fierce controversies and debate after its fall. The exhibit follows many of the themes mentioned above both before and after the history altering fall of the Wall, and in doing so explores the continuities and discontinuities in the decade following reunification with a particular emphasis on developments at seven different locations inside Prenzlauer Berg.
