![]() "No, absolutely not! Just looking at the pictures, the iconography, you cannot really tell. Speaking to EUobserver, curator Stefanie Dietzel, admitted one of the amusing things about compiling the mammoth show was that - minus picture credits or texts - nine times out of ten it would be hard to know if the factory or plant was in the east or west. Textile spinning machines in Augsburg, West Germany, 1961 (Photo: Bayerisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, Deutsche Historiches Museum) Spinning machines in Leinefelde, East Germany, 1965 (Photo: Martin Schmidt, Deutsches Historisches Museum) It's an insight into how the two competing political and economic systems saw themselves - and wanted to be seen by others. ![]() Not only that, but the exhibition, covering two floors, consists of only officially sanctioned photographs - these are the images the West German conglomerates took for press and publicity purposes, and the East German regime published for public consumption and propaganda purposes. 'Bread, Prosperity, Beauty' - East Germany's five-year plan for its chemical industry, 1959 (Photo: DHM, Matthew Tempest) It covers not just coal and steel, but also the automobile industry, textiles, chemicals (the 1959 DDR five-year plan for its chemicals industry came with the slogan: Bread, Prosperity, Beauty) and many others, from the years 1949-1990 (when east Germany was formally dissolved and amalgamated into West Germany). Split down the middle - both geographically and politically - the two new German states are the subject of a new exhibition that opens this week at the Deutsches Historiches Museum in Berlin: Fortschritt als Versprechen - Industriefotografie im Geteilten Deutschland. Or, more specifically, West Germany (a founding member of the coal and steel community), and East Germany (a member of the Warsaw Pact and a socialist state barely independent of Moscow and the USSR.) ![]() The Trabant's West German 'rival': the assembly line of the Opel Rekord, in Russelheim, Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), in 1962 (Photo: Opel Automobile GmbH, Deutsches Historiches Museum).
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