Cold War Hot Air

The exhibition organisers assume that a majority of its visitors will be Berliners, because the exhibition prompts them to remember what it was like to visit the building when it was still standing. It asks questions about the facilities available, and the sports and leisure activities it supported. (Besides the Volksstimme, there were several auditoria, art galleries, restaurants and beerhalls; a theatre; a cinema; a bowling alley; a swimming pool; a billiards hall; a skating rink; and a gymnasium.) The exhibition in fact asks a question about practically every object on show, which might seem to the non-German like a stereotypically German way to proceed. It even includes as a major part of the display a range of written responses to its leading questions. These vary between the bluntly dismissive (‘I never went near the place’) and the fondly nostalgic.

It swiftly becomes clear that the balance is tipped towards the latter – towards the camaraderie between work colleagues, between members of the various sports clubs and between the young people negotiating a place within the social culture that was fostered by the DDR. The Palace of the Republic operated as a laboratory for growing this culture within a controlled environment, and so the visitors’ comments offer a revealing array of responses to this control, ranging from nostalgic acquiescence to vehement and bitter rejection. The physical impedimenta – articles of furniture, the cutlery and crockery of the 1970s, waiters’ uniforms, office equipment – all now seem fatally compromised by a desire to look and feel cautiously futuristic that of course dates more rapidly than anything else. But ...