„Not Everything Was Rubbish“: The Liquidation of the Camera Manufacturer Pentacon in Dresden

Záznam z ústavního semináře, který se uskutečnil 27. 11. 2024 v Ústavu pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR. 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. Vystupující: Friederike Kind-Kovács a Maren Hachmeister (obě Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung, TU Dresden)Další diskutující: Lenka Krátká a Václav Rameš (oba Ústav pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR, v. v. i.) Pravidelný ústavní seminář se koná vždy poslední středu v měsíci od 16:00 ve studovně Ústavu pro soudobé dějiny AV ČR ve Vlašské ulici v Praze. Program naleznete na našem webu www.usd.cas.cz.