On a bright autumn Sunday in Crimmitschau, Germany, sun sifted through white-trimmed windows onto the floors of a former textile factory, where a group of locals had gathered for an exhibition. Industrial-scale weaving mills and spools of gleaming thread lined the walls. A few thousand people once worked in the textile industry in this small town in Saxony, in the former East Germany.
A series of banners displayed the stories of East Germans who fought to keep factories like this one open in the early 1990s. Organized by Die Linke’s (The Left Party’s) Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, this traveling exhibition focuses on the deeply controversial Treuhand Anstalt, the agency that oversaw the privatisation of the East German economy from 1990-1994. Through individual and collective stories, curator Katrin Rohnstock told me she aims to shed light on the Treuhand’s legacy, and why it is seen here as a symbol for what went wrong with Germany’s reunification.
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