Once popular and sought-after in the former East Germany, the concrete prefab housing complexes known as Plattenbau have long suffered from a poor reputation. Now, a new exhibition is rediscovering their cultural heritage and examining their complex legacy in German society.
In the second half of the 20th century, high-rise residential buildings constructed from prefabricated concrete panels were built in many parts of the world. They were particularly popular in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), where they became known as "Plattenbauten." These structures still shape the landscape of many cities in eastern Germany, and some of them are now under historic preservation protection.
While many people today simply find these buildings ugly, the Kunsthaus Potsdam is taking a completely different perspective on these structures. The exhibition "Wohnkomplex. Kunst und Leben im Plattenbau" (Residential Complex: Art and Life in Prefab Housing) examines the cultural heritage of these prefabricated buildings as the "centerpiece of GDR social policy," as a "place of socialization," and as a "symbol of real socialist progress," according to the museum's website.
The focus is not on the architectural heritage, but rather on the Plattenbau as a "cultural resonance space that raises questions about belonging, community, and memory." Exhibition curator Kito Nedo, born in the 1970s in Leipzig during the heyday of Plattenbau construction, says he only realized later in life how these housing settlements shaped him and his life as a "socialization environment."
Nedo explains that he is not alone in this experience, as many people lived in these neighborhoods and therefore share "a collective residential memory" that is reflected in some of the artworks. The exhibition's goal is to make the many facets of Plattenbau visible while not forgetting that the housing complexes were also the setting for a "painful transformation" triggered by German reunification.
Finding affordable housing in major cities has been a difficult issue for at least 200 years, Nedo points out, and the situation seems to be getting worse rather than better in many parts of the world today. After the end of World War II, housing shortage was definitely a problem in Germany. Many cities had been destroyed by bombing raids, and the influx of German refugees from the east exacerbated the problem.
Renovating old buildings was expensive, especially since many older buildings lacked heating and running hot water. Bathrooms were often shared facilities outside the apartments. As an alternative, the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) launched its housing construction program in October 1973, promising to eliminate the housing shortage within the next two decades.
This initiative was well-received, and demand for the newly built apartments was enormous. The new building complexes were not only marketed as a modern solution for housing large numbers of people, but the SED leadership also praised them as the embodiment of socialist utopia. Part of this idealistic vision was that schools, kindergartens, commercial spaces, cultural centers, and youth clubs were integrated into the housing complexes.
Rents were subsidized by the state and could therefore be kept correspondingly low, which from an economic perspective was naturally an "economic minus mission," as Nedo puts it. The Berlin-Marzahn Plattenbau settlement was the largest housing construction project in the GDR, representing the scale and ambition of this social housing program.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and what was once a utopia soon became a dystopia. After German reunification, many of the GDR's state-owned industrial enterprises were dissolved, leading to high unemployment rates in the urban areas that had once been specifically developed for working-class families. The increasing desperation of the people manifested itself in extremism.
Today, the post-reunification years are also referred to as the "baseball bat years" - an allusion to the fact that there were many neo-Nazis who walked around armed with baseball bats. The number of right-wing extremist violent crimes increased dramatically at that time and culminated in xenophobic riots in cities like Hoyerswerda and Rostock-Lichtenhagen.
This aspect is also part of the legacy of the Plattenbau and is addressed in the Potsdam exhibition, including through an installation by artist Henrike Naumann, who will represent Germany at the Venice Biennale in 2026. In her installation "Triangular Stories (Amnesia Terror)," Naumann recreates two corners of rooms from Plattenbau apartments and shows two youth cliques from the early 1990s in videos.
One video shows a group of ravers getting high on drugs, while the other features three neo-Nazis hanging around - a staged version of the young people who would found the terrorist organization National Socialist Underground (NSU) a few years later. This installation powerfully captures the dark turn that some communities took during the difficult transition period.
Curator Nedo wants to let the artworks speak for themselves. His selection focuses on art that expresses a certain ambivalence and allows for different interpretations. Berlin artist Markus Draper recreates the skeletons of faceless Plattenbau buildings in his work "Grauzone" (Gray Zone). The zinc casts are replicas of the residential blocks where RAF terrorists hid with the help of the Stasi in the 1980s.
The curator was particularly moved by a series of paintings and drawings by artist Sabine Moritz. She reproduces details of her childhood in the 1970s in Lobeda, a Plattenbau suburb of Jena. The style of her drawings is naive, but her personal memories are very precise and reflect those of many people - after all, almost a quarter of the GDR's total population lived in such housing settlements at some point.
After Plattenbau was considered a problematic remnant of the GDR for decades, it is now receiving a new form of attention. Various exhibitions in Germany are dealing with the architectural heritage of that era, including the "Concrete Festival" in Chemnitz (September 27 - October 18, 2025) and "Platte Ost/West" at the Dresden City Museum (February 28 - November 29, 2026).
Nedo emphasizes that this is not about celebrating "Ostalgie" - nostalgia for the former GDR. Plattenbau neighborhoods have long been ignored and forgotten by large parts of the population. He sees the exhibitions as an opportunity to draw attention to them again and perhaps also as "an appeal to engage with them." This renewed interest represents a significant shift in how Germany views this controversial architectural legacy.
