Seminar: "Not Everything Was Rubbish": The Liquidation of the Camera Manufacturer Pentacon in Dresden
We would like to invite you to the next seminar, which will take place on Wednesday, November 27, 2024 at 4:00 PM in the Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences (Vlašská 355/9, Prague 1).
This seminar is the first in a series of „Prague-Dresden Lectures“, organized in cooperation with the Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung at the University of Dresden. The theme of this series of seminars, which will take place alternately in Prague and Dresden, is „Topographies of Transformation“. The full programme of the thematic series is available here.
Annotation:
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 of 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.
Keynote speakers: Friederike Kind-Kovács and Maren Hachmeister (both Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung, TU Dresden)
Comments: Lenka Krátká and Vítězslav Sommer (both Institute of Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences)
The seminar will be held in English and in a hybrid format, both at the usual venue in Vlašská and online. Those interested in participating online via the Zoom platform are asked to register at hait@tu-dresden.de to receive a link.
Please note that an audio recording of the seminar will be made, which will then be available on the Institute’s website and Spotify.