Of Friends and Comrades: The Moral Economy of Friendship in Postwar East Germany

Inspired by the startling persistence of cultural and social divisions twenty years after the Berlin Wall came down in the fall of 1989, this paper proposes that a study of amateur photography may help our understanding of how forty years of separation has led to the emergence of two very distinct sets of mentalities in East and West Germany. Contemporary Historians have comfortably explored 20^th century ideologies in the public realm through an analysis of political propaganda campaigns, the history of consumption and population policies, state-sponsored architecture, or the political rhetoric and writings of public intellectuals. Less research has been done, however, to examine how these ideologies impacted the ways individual citizens thought about themselves and their communities, how their ideas of love and companionship, their family values, their sense of purpose, notions of propriety, and most importantly for this paper, concepts of friendship and belonging have been framed and profoundly altered by the political that permeated the entirety of their lived realities at work and in the home. This paper is thus particularly interested in what private photographs may tell us about the complicated ways in which ideologies not only shape public behavior, political cultures and aesthetics, but also profoundly impact those spheres in everyday life that are often assumed to exist as a world apart from the machinations of political structures i.e. the more elusive realm of affect and individual friendship. The objective of the proposed paper is thus twofold: through an analysis of amateur photographs it wishes to contribute and possibly reframe the historiography of everyday life in the Cold War Germanies and aims to (re)introduce private photography as an immensely rich source for historians of mentalities in particular.