ABSTRACT
The public discussion of the role of art in the socialist “Staat der Arbeiter und Bauern” was carefully monitored by the Central Committee. After the horrors of the National Socialist regime, however, and the lies of its propaganda apparatus, the German people on both sides of the political divide were unsure of their cultural bearings and still searching for models that could inform the art of the future. Oskar Nerlinger argued that no art could be free from politics even that which claimed to be, and therefore all art, as a public medium, should be made accessible to the people. Scholarship has shown that the contacts and communications between East and West Germany in the art world were very vigorous in spite of the political division and the metaphorical Iron Curtain.
