Public History | Completed Projects

Using an extensive body of exhibition photos, this project analysed the depiction of prehistory in museums of the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR as well as discourses that led to the alteration or persistence of conceptions of history.

The virtual exhibition designed and implemented by students of Master Public History (Free University Berlin/ZZF Potsdam) tells ‘history with stories’. Short biographies provide an insight into the careers of senior personnel from both German interior ministries. It is closely intertwined with the thematic focal points, offers a multifaceted approach and brings historical processes to life.

The new permanent exhibition has been showing an overview of central themes of everyday life and its contexts. These range from "work" to "home" to the "socialist way of life" by means of numerous objects, photographs and documents.

The website, which covers the period from April 1952 to the end of 1953, reconstructs what led to the crisis, the uprising itself and the months thereafter: It explains the causes, the course and the consequences. The texts are illustrated and supplemented by a variety of different sources: for example film clips and original sounds from the RIAS archive.

Fourteen information steles at selected locations on the grounds of the Waldsiedlung Wandlitz provide information about why the settlement was built on this site, which politicians inhabited it and who supplied it. 

Container exhibitions provided information on the history of migration using the example of Berlin.

The exhibition was opened in 2009 in the gatehouses of Schönhausen Palace in Berlin, seat of the first and only president of the GDR, Wilhelm Pieck.

The ZZF, in collaboration with the German Historical Museum, developed the exhibition and a catalogue of the same name.

In 2009, the exhibition was opened at and in the former Commandant’s Tower in Drewitz-Dreilinden together with the association Checkpoint Bravo.

From 19 August to 12 November 2014, the tweets, wherever possible in real-time, told the breathtaking events on the road to the peaceful revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall.