Vortrag
“Not everything was Rubbish": The Liquidation of the Camera Manufacturer Pentacon in Dresden

The East German camera manufacturer Pentacon was one of the most prestigious enterprises of the GDR and was well-known across Europe and beyond. This state-owned enterprise had more than 5,000 employees in Dresden (Saxony) and the surrounding area when the West German privatization agency (Treuhandanstalt) decided in October 1990 to liquidate Pentacon. The shock of this decision continues to resonate among former employees until today, as Pentacon had stood at the center of both their professional careers and their social lives. The liquidation is remembered as a process of “scrapping” valuable and genuinely East German expertise. Life story interviews with former Pentacon employees conducted over the last two years show a surprising emphasis on selected and harmonized “good” memories, mainly articulated by former Pentacon cadres. The experience of everyday life in a dictatorship, which was anything but easy, is rather absent from public memory on Pentacon, while the experience of badly managed post-socialist deindustrialization predominates. In cooperation with the Technische Sammlungen Dresden, the Hannah Arendt Institute and students of the Dresden University of Technology, individual and collective experiences of former Pentacon employees with the political turnaround of 1989 and its consequences for their individual biographies have been researched since 2022. The planned lecture is dedicated to this process and its effects on the work and lives of former Pentacon employees. The lecture seeks to discuss and diversify the hitherto suspiciously uniform narrative on Pentacon's liquidation. In this way, the lecture addresses transformations of work and biographical traumas that increasingly contributed to the collective (East German) memory of German reunification in the past years.

Maren Hachmeister is a research fellow at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at TU Dresden and is currently working on her postdoctoral project on forms of self-organization in the long twentieth century. She received her PhD in East European History from Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in 2019. Her research interests include the social history of East Central Europe and East Germany, care, volunteering, and aging. She is co-editor of the journal special issue “Multiple Transformations: Lived Experiences and Post-Socialist Cultures of Work” (Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 2023). Her latest article is “Overlooked and Undeserving: Older People in Narratives of Return in Post-1989 East Germany“ (East European Politics and Societies, 2023). She joined the COST Action 20105 “Slow Memory” in 2023.

Friederike Kind-Kovacs is a senior researcher at the Hannah Arendt Institute at TU Dresden and a lecturer at Regensburg University. She is a 20th century historian with a special interest in the transnational history of Central Europe and especially the history of childhood. In 2022 she published with IUP Budapest’s Children: Humanitarian Relief in the Aftermath of the Great War, which received in 2023 the “Grace Abbott Book Prize” of the SHCY. In 2022 she also co-authored The Wireless World: Global Histories of International Radio Broadcasting with OUP. In the past she held the Senior Botstiber Fellowship at the IAS in Budapest and a Fellowship at the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena. She is also the author of Written Here, Published There: How Underground Literature Crossed the Iron Curtain (CEU, 2014), a monograph for which she won the University of Southern California Book Prize in Cultural and Literary Studies in 2015.

The talk is part of the HAIT Lecture Series Lost (in) Transformation: Answers from the Recent Past to Challenges of Today in the winter semester and the Dresden-Prague Talks. Veronika Pehe will be chair of the lecture. Lenka Krátka and Martin Štefek will be Commentators.

The Lecture Series takes place in Prague in the library (Vlašská 9) and hybrid via Zoom.

If you would like to attend, please register by the Monday before the event at: hait@tu-dresden.de, stating your full name. The registration link will be sent to you separately a few days before the start of the event.

Diese Maßnahme ist mitfinanziert durch Steuermittel auf Grundlage des vom Sächsischen Landtag beschlossenen Haushalts.