The SED's Treasure House

Museums are the places where we now keep our relics of times past. Generally they tended to originate in the treasuries and curiosity chambers of kings and emperors, in the bright assortment of gifts that were presented in homage to great rulers: silver sets and medallions, ivory and precious stones, ostrich eggs and adders' tongues, Baltic amber and Indian spices. Gifts were intended to win a prince's favour. And the ruler himself could see from the presents how mighty and revered he was.
The ecclesiastical great competed with secular princes in their quest for precious mementoes of the kingdom of heaven. Their treasuries featured splinters of the True Cross, soil from Golgatha, relics of the saints and of the church fathers. Almost anything brought back from the Holy Land might prompt the crafting of a magnificent reliquary or artistically embellished ossuary. The sacred books of the Middle Ages recorded these receptacles meticulously and reproduced them in miniature woodcuts. In this respect they might be considered the first ever museum catalogues.
The present publication might well be viewed as a sacred book recording the former power of socialism, now a faded thing. It records the symbols and icons of socialist holy days and dogmas. There are gifts made by other states of the socialist brotherhood, in mutual respect and all good faith: conversation pieces featuring the Kremlin, tanks and rockets, or a globe, symbolizing the universal sovereignty of Communism, surrounded by the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin. These things served to reinforce confidence that all the brotherhood were following the same star - the red star of Soviet Communism. Relics, symbols and souvenirs, from the home-made present to the heraldically bombastic official gift, are all in this Iconographia socialistica.
This collection, representing forty years of East German history, was fortunately spared the ravages of iconoclasts from East and West alike. Now this entire socialist universe is in the good and methodical hands of the Deutsches Historisches Museum (German History Museum) - preserved from ruin, a curious collection of surviving relics in a democratic world with few symbols of its own.

Dieter Vorsteher Berlin, March 1994