Public History | Completed Projects

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.

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.

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.

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 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.