Exhibition: Women in Divided Germany

An exhibition by the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship

The division of Germany has been history for over three decades. Nevertheless, we still encounter many clichés that are attributed to women in East and West Germany. The Western woman, who is sometimes described as a homebody at the stove, sometimes as a tough career woman. The East German woman who “stands her ground” in coal mining. Who is sometimes described as tough and sometimes as a raven mother because she puts the children in the crèche. The Western woman who genders and the Eastern woman who doesn’t know what to do with it. The Eastern woman who is seen as the loser of German unity … The list of attributions is long. And although some of them are grotesquely contradictory, they all give the impression that they know exactly what makes THE Eastern woman and THE Western woman tick. Above all, one thing seems to be clear: they all tick the same way, but in comparison to the other part of Germany, they tick quite differently. Where do these attributions come from? And what is true about them?

The exhibition “Women in Divided Germany” aims to answer these questions. Published by the Federal Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED Dictatorship and curated by Clara Marz, the exhibition is a contribution to the 35th anniversary of German reunification. The different realities of life for women in the Federal Republic and the GDR in the 1970s and 1980s are depicted on 20 posters.

The aim of the exhibition is to make the diverse experiences of women visible and to show the similarities and differences between their German-German lives. At the same time, the exhibition raises the question of whether women in both German states shared a common striving for self-determination in a male-dominated system, despite the different political and social conditions.