La Maison berlinoise du travail culturel

While the economic and social activities of the SED in the GDR are well known, research has so far paid significantly less attention to the language of politics in the artistic field, and in particular to the central question of how this regime conceived its role with regard to workers' artistic practices, and more generally to the role of cultural practices in citizens' daily lives. The originality of this study lies in its combination of several approaches based on cultural history, social history, and political science. Rejecting the view of the GDR as a homogeneous society where everything was decided at the top and enforced at the bottom, the author examines the archives of the Berlin House of Cultural Affairs, enabling her to compare Marxist theories on workers’ artistic practices with the historical dynamics that shaped their practical implementation from the mid-1950s until the fall of the Wall.