Public History | Completed Projects

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.

The Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam, and the Municipal Museum Berlin have prepaired a joint exhibition on East Berlin in the Ephraim-Palais in the Nikolaiviertel (May 11 to November 10, 2019). It provided new perspectives on the former metropolis of East Germany. The social and cultural dimensions of urban life in East Berlin were the heart of the exhibition.

Located in the heart of historic Potsdam, the Lindenstrasse memorial site is a unique place of memory. The permanent exhibition at the Lindenstrasse memorial site has been open to visitors since September 12, 2013.

The aim of the project was to promote public engagement with family biographical testimonies to the Second World War from German and Polish perspectives. To this end, photographs, letters and diaries from private collections documenting the German invasion of Poland were collected. Some of the material was digitized, historically classified and made available to the public in an online exhibition.

Together with the public relations department of the Brandenburg Landtag, the Public History section wrote texts for the pupil calendar 2019/2020 on the topic of "Friedliche Revolution". It explained both the Cold War and the SED dictatorship.

The permanent exhibition at the Seelow Heights Memorial Site informs visitors about the fighting west of the Oder at the end of the Second World War and the history of the memorial site since 1945.

Thirty-two places of remembrance in Brandenburg from the period of the Nazi dictatorship from 1933 to 1945 and the SBZ/DDR dictatorship from 1945-1989/90 were presented in short information texts by scientists from the ZZF Potsdam.

The project reconstructed the history of the Liebknecht Portal from newspaper articles, eyewitness reports, literary depictions, construction files and planning sketches – from the appearance of the workers’ leaders in front of the Palace entrance to the presentation of the balcony scene in the GDR’s interpretation of history.

In the exhibition and an accompanying website, the image database developed by the project group at the ZZF Potsdam presented using an excerpt. The database was used to catalogue the stocks of art works from 165 museums, collections, galleries, special depots and enterprises of the project partners.

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.