Design - Reality and Fetish in the Wende Museum

East German reality before the Wende: Volkspolizei in the Trabant car
The State was everywhere.

The design of Socialist realism as cult object in a museum and a full page in this month's Metropolis Magazine.

Not sure what it tells us that there is a Wende Museum (Wende is what German call the fall of the wall) in Los Angeles and not in Berlin or Dresden.

It probably means that in order to fetishize an object, one has to be far removed of the squalid context in which originated. People in Dresden or Leipzig would not yet be ready to make the former life a cult object, even if they often seem to be plenty "homesick" for the old times.

East German transistor radio named Trabant just like the ubiquitous two stroke car that
became a symbol of the East German brand of socialism