383 younger György Lukács had reacted against.14 This was to change significantly as a result of foreign and domestic political developments: the signing of the Basic Treaty between the GDR and the Federal Republic (West Germany) in December 1972, which recognised the GDR as a sovereign state and acknowledged that there were two Germanies. Promptly following the treaty, the GDR was admitted to UNESCO and, in 1973, to the United Nations, and this official international recognition marked a sea-change in the GDR’s political stance towards West Germany, pursued under the banner of the ‘theory of divergence’.15 Until then, the GDR’s foreign cultural policy had played a central role in establishing diplomatic relations with capitalist countries abroad, the socalled kapitalistisches Ausland. Concerts, guest performances and, not least, exhibitions were seen as a form of seemingly friendly cultural export16 in the context of which diplomatic issues could be negotiated.17 The participation of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden in the Friedrich retrospective in London with loans should be seen against this political backdrop, as surviving archive documents attest.18 It should be borne in mind that, over and above official instructions, trips within the framework of such state-sponsored collaborations offered the delegates (in this case Hans Joachim Neidhardt) above all the opportunity to see and study works in cultural institutions that would otherwise have been inaccessible to East German citizens and to establish medium- and long-term contacts that could be subsequently maintained via correspondence.19 West Germany’s recognition of the GDR as a sovereign state was largely ideologically motivated and should be seen against the background of Chancellor Willy Brandt’s Neue Ostpolitik and the strategy of “change through rapprochement”.20 The East-German response was a foreign policy characterised by increasing demarcation, implemented on the basis of the above-mentioned theory of ‘divergence’, with the view that: “in the more than 40 years of postwar history, two German national cultures had emerged and that it could therefore no longer be claimed that culture was the bond continuing to hold a single existing German nation together.”21 At the domestic level, this change of course led to calls for the creation or rather identification of a distinct socialist cultural heritage22 – in retrospect certainly an “invented tradition”, to use Hobsbawn’s phrase23 – in which universities in particular, but also cultural institutions such as museums, were entrusted with the not inconsiderable task of making hitherto obscure individuals and under-researched works accessible and fruitful for this socialist cultural heritage.24 This brings us back to Hans Joachim Neidhardt and his research on Dresden Romanticism for exhibitions and publications. It was no coincidence that the Friedrich retrospective at the Albertinum in 1974–1975 was declared by the Ministry of Culture of the GDR as a state honour for the artist, even though Friedrich (as well as his Romantic contemporaries) had previously received scant scholarly attention. The artist, who was born in Greifswald in 1774 and spent most of his artistic career in Dresden, seemed ideally suited for appropriation as a historical figure in a socialist cultural heritage because of his biography, which could be set entirely within the confines of the territory of what was now the GDR. Friedrich was much less an obvious choice, however, when it came to attempting to frame his art and its significance within a socialist context. In the accompanying catalogue, the essays published by Peter H. Feist and Irma Emmrich constructed 3 Friedrich exhibition in the Albertinum 1974–1975, exhibition room/Klingersaal 4 Friedrich Exhibition in the Albertinum 1974–1975, exhibition room/Mosaiksaal
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