Die Wohnzeitschrift als Wäʼende-Moderatorin

Wie NEUES WOHNEN. kultur im heim im Beitrittsjahr 1990 agiert

Abstract

This paper deals with the ›Wende‹ volume (1990) of NEUES WOHNEN, a GDR home design magazine, having previously operated as kultur im heim for many years. The aim is to show how during the ›Wende‹—the period following the Peaceful Revolution of 1989—the sphere of East German housing, rarely focused on by media at that time, was negotiated in a printed periodical during the process of the GDR-dissolving German reunification. Doing so, the journal’s gaze is a specifically ›East German‹ one, confronted with new epistemic ingredients and actors when opening GDR-specific ways of negotiation. With special attention to the print order and semantics circulating between the issues, individual magazine sections are selected to demonstrate two aspects: how the magazine faces problems of providing home design models in which Eastern German identities can be lived out as Federal German ones; and how, through these very efforts, the restitution of the value ›bourgeois‹ (›bürgerlich‹) becomes important for the journal’s self-understanding after the ›Wende‹.