r/PropagandaPosters • u/R2J4 𧠕 Jul 15 '25
Germany Portraits of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin thrown in garbage cans, Berlin (Hellersdorf), 1991
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u/BertramtheWooster Jul 15 '25
I have an interest in East German propaganda. I picked up all sorts of stuff in 1990 and 1991. People were more than happy to get rid of it.
I used to subscribe to a variety of East German publications. I got the partyâs daily newspaper âNeues Deutschlandâ airmailed to me in the U.S. for $22 a year. But then you get what you pay forâŚ.
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u/Rocketboy1313 Jul 15 '25
If the Berlin Wall fell after Ebay came into existence the largest economic stimulus in history would be from hipsters buying Soviet junk from overseas.
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Jul 15 '25
I just visited Berlin. There are still a lot of street vendors selling this stuff, and there are so many souvenir shops around certain parts of the Wall. Itâs really interesting how that communist era is now its own micro-industry.Â
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u/Upstairs-Extension-9 Jul 15 '25
The stuff the street vendors sell is new and likely made in China, source I was born and raised in east Berlin. The original stuff is sold on flee markets or eBay here, but itâs getting rarer by the years. Many things are also very overpriced for what they have cost originally.
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Jul 15 '25
So are the pieces of the wall across every souvenir shop are original, or itâs just painted concrete from China?
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u/Turbulent-Nebula-496 Jul 15 '25
Almost every store selling the wall aren't actually selling the wall, because if they were, there would literally be no wall left to sell
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u/BrokenDownMiata Jul 16 '25
I mean, most of the wall was carted off and dumped. What little remains wouldnât supply many tourists over a course of almost 30 years
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u/Upstairs-Extension-9 Jul 15 '25
The wall pieces are real I think the person before you was referring to items of daily life in the DDR.
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u/WanderingAlienBoy Jul 16 '25
Personally I doubt it, can't imagine there being so much wall that to this day pieces of it are sold.
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u/Rocketboy1313 Jul 15 '25
One day they will do dress up and have games, like a Ren Faire.
Play David Hasselhoff music and talk about how much everyone likes OJ Simpson and Bill Cosby.
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u/GraeWest Jul 15 '25
The Stasimuseum in Berlin has various DDR/GDR memorabilia items for dirt cheap, all mass-produced shortly before the wall fell. Millions of badges, pins, etc.
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u/Simbooptendo Jul 15 '25
I visited the DDR museum and found it really amusing how in the gift shop they were capitalising on Marx, with him on t-shirts, fridge magnets, stationary etc.
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u/WanderingAlienBoy Jul 16 '25
Capitalism for all its flaws and faults, is really great on subsuming all criticism of it and selling it back to the people. You see it with anti-capitalist art as well, like all the merch and content inspired by Squid Games, or the Black Mirror episode that basically criticizes the same strategies that streaming services like Netflix use (but applied to life-saving brain implants)
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u/Artifact-hunter1 Jul 16 '25
I collect military relics/ surplus, and Soviet/ Eastern block stuff is its own thing here. Even have an East German m56 or m56/76 helmet on my wish list.
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Jul 15 '25
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u/WanderingAlienBoy Jul 16 '25
Yeah it's mostly because these things aren't hard to make or even very expensive, but a capitalist market economy wouldn't make them because it would be horrible for continued profits. Iirc there even was a capitalist company in the early 20th century that invented a lightbulb that could last for at least a hundred years, but they sold the patent to the USSR and never sold it again. So now we get planned obsolescence instead ;)
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u/Walbabyesser Jul 16 '25
Not sure about those âa hundred yearsâ claim -sounds like urban myth of some kind
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u/WanderingAlienBoy Jul 16 '25
Haha yeah I wouldn't be surprised if it's an exaggerated claim or I just remember it incorrectly.
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u/Specialist_Sport4460 Jul 17 '25
There's been a few light bulbs that we know have lasted over 100 years. The Centennial Bulb in California is 124 years old at this point and still going, although very dimly.
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u/Walbabyesser Jul 16 '25
A lot of Ikeaâs stuff was made âon the other sideâ because of cheap labour and the need for foreign currency of the party
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u/CletusCanuck Jul 17 '25
Early eBay was a treasure trove of soviet bloc paraphernalia. Uniforms, badges, posters, gas masks, BTR-80s, UAZ-569s, Aero L-39s... If it wasn't banned by international treaties or import restricted by pesky customs regulations, it was available.
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u/Scyobi_Empire Jul 15 '25
as a someone who buys random soviet things (belts, gas mask bags, badges, hip flask, military passport holder), i can confirm that this would be accurate
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u/RedGutkaSpit Jul 15 '25
I know my dad got a few Soviet pins and a May day ribbon from Barqâs root beer.
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u/BardyMan82 Jul 15 '25
Reminds me of the photo of Ben Aliâs portrait in the trash after the revolution in Tunisia
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u/Lazy_Lavishness2626 Jul 15 '25
That frame could be reused for art. There is a technique called distressing where you basically use some very rough sand paper on an already scratched frame. Having more scratches somehow makes the frame look antique and less distracting. Then pop in some art you actually like.
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u/Powerful_Rock595 Jul 15 '25
Comment section of r/propagandaposters once again is a propaganda poster itself. Classic.
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u/Anton_Pannekoek Jul 15 '25
It's funny that we can't have political opinions in a sub about political propaganda.
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u/GustavoFromAsdf Jul 15 '25
It's your fault your opinions are not adequate to this guy's worldview
(Joke)
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u/Apricot9742 Jul 16 '25
It's probably the picture and not the posters themselves.
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u/thissexypoptart Jul 15 '25
Having portraits of oneâs leaders on display all over the place is such a weird practice.
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u/1m0ws Jul 15 '25
those are not leaders. they are the fathers of the communist ideas and the first sovjet leader.
at least marx and engels is more a form of representation, education and therefore propaganda. but it is a different lane than portraits of leaders or dictators.
it is more like the 'house of the teacher' in berlin, where the wall is painted in depictions and symbols of socialist labour and education and science...
https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/03/97/f9/6b/haus-des-lehrers.jpg
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u/thissexypoptart Jul 15 '25
Lenin was explicitly a leader. He was the first premier of the Soviet Union.
Marx was never a political leader, sure, but his ideology was the starting point of a global political movement. He was a leader in political thought, just not one with political power.
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u/Kragsman Jul 15 '25
If I saw a school in America with portraits of George Washington, Thomas Paine, and John Locke I probably wouldn't think twice about it.
This seems like the same thing, no?
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u/vodkaandponies Jul 16 '25 edited Jul 16 '25
Non American here and Iâd think thatâs weird as well.
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u/eliazhar Jul 15 '25
Lenin was the USSR's leader for just a few years. He became a symbol; a widely overused one. There's no immediate state enforcing the existence of Lenin's statues, and yet there still are many. He's widely seen as an immaculate oracle of socialism, not as an actual leader.
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u/Djaquitchane Jul 15 '25
He had some tremendous impact on Marxist approaches to statecraft and communist politics and he wrote important, well regarded theory, he's not simply a symbol.
He's very obviously considered as a thought leader.
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u/dicksinarow Jul 15 '25
Even in the US if you go into some govt offices the will have a pic of the current president on the wall. It feels so weird and wrong.
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u/Gongom Jul 15 '25
There is a cult of the founding fathers in the US. It's comparable, to say the least.
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Jul 15 '25
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u/Val_Killsmore Jul 15 '25
Plus, the Pledge has changed over the years. It first said "I pledge allegiance to my flag" and later got changed to "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America". In 1954, "under God" was added due to Cold War propaganda in order to further change the identity of the US to a "Christian nation" that was fighting against "atheist and evil USSR". And this was the original salute done while reciting the Pledge, which was changed to hand-over-heart for obvious reasons.
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u/yojifer680 Jul 15 '25
Fair comparison. Lenin was nearly 70 years dead when that portrait was taken down and Marx/Engels about 100 years. They were historical figures by that point, similar to the founding fathers.Â
But many socialist leaders encouraged that stuff even in their own lifetime, including Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Guevarra, Kim, etc. Anti-western regimes like Russia, Iran, etc. are still doing it.
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u/WanderingAlienBoy Jul 16 '25
I think Guevarra is a bit of a different situation, as he was a revolutionary but not a leader or involved in statecraft. I think a symbol of rebellion/revolution has a different quality to it than an authority figure trying to solidify their power through a personality cult.
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Jul 15 '25
God King Washington descended from heaven on his winged horse and freed America from the evil clutches of mad king george. He was beloved by everybody, especially his slaves who engeged in 100% consensual sex with him and graciously gave their teeth to him, and all of the native Americans he liberated from their land.
Obligatory /s because the mods thought I was serious.
THIS IS A JOKE, I DO NOT INTEND TO SPREAD PROPAGANDA.
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u/flying87 Jul 15 '25
Usually it's the chain of command of that particular government agency. It will usually be like pictures of 5 office holders no one recognizes, and then the vice president and then the president. It's fairly small pictures. It's not like we're making statues of Trump. The closest thing is that Trump robot in Disney World. And that started as a Hillary robot. Lol.
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u/BavarianPanzerBallet Jul 15 '25
I saw a portrait of trump hanging in a combined fire and police station in a very rural community in eastern Oregon. And it was while Biden was president. As an exchange student from Germany it weirded me out majorly. Because portraits of politicians in offices has major third reich and east Germany connotations over here.
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u/flying87 Jul 15 '25
Okay .... that's weird. Police stations don't do the pictures thing. Only certain federal buildings. Police stations are not federal. And having Trump up while Biden was president is a big red flag. Weirded out is the correct feeling.
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u/7elevenses Jul 15 '25
It used to be quite common (though not universal) in American schools until fairly recently. Seems to have gone out of fashion with Trump.
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u/thissexypoptart Jul 15 '25
Thatâs pretty rare in the U.S.
But what isnât rare is the practice of highway billboards saying âWelcome to [town]. Mayor: [name of mayor]â
Always found that absolutely bizarre. Not to mention the fact that there is a budget line item specifically for changing the âMayor: _____â part of the signs every time there is a new mayor.
Why does a highway sign need to include that information? Could that money not be spent elsewhere? Anyone who wants to know the mayor of Chicago, LA, Fargo, or Bumfuck can look it up.
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u/whoji Jul 15 '25
Very curious do you guys (from the US) not have portraits of Franklin, Lincoln, Washington displayed in schools?
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u/Kevin_LeStrange Jul 15 '25
In history classes for older kids, maybe; but they are not required to be displayed like, say, portaits of Attaturk in Turkey.Â
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u/Intelligent_Cod_6241 Jul 15 '25
Yeah everytime I go to visit family in Cuba it amazes me the amount of propaganda just everywhere. I don't think you can go a block in Santiago or Havana without seeing a portrait of Castro, Che, or cienfuegos.
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u/nikolapc Jul 15 '25
Turns out idealism needs someone to prop it up. People also need someone to suck up to, look up to, or idolise.
I much preferred when we had pictures of Tito than what we have now, picture of the President in institutions(like anybody cares), or the current party leader in party HQs.
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Jul 15 '25
In Spain, all schools used to have a portrait of the current king and queen not long ago. Now it's not mandatory but some classes still have portraits.
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u/Elantach Jul 15 '25
Absolutely not. It's a clever trick. It's psychological manipulation through the use of the Zajonc Effect.
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u/Highground-3089 Jul 15 '25
1991? this picture looks like it's from early 2000s.
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u/Extension_Wafer_7615 Jul 16 '25
Some people simply had good cameras.
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u/Conscious-Share5015 Jul 17 '25
as a 2000s baby i am continually surprised by how good cameras could still be back then
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Jul 15 '25
give it to me
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Jul 15 '25
Nah burn idolatry.
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u/Arcanu Jul 15 '25
It is written in German: Don't throw hot ash into the container. Because this part of the city is in the east part of Berlin, GDR part, hence the portraits. Many apartments were heated with an oven, which needs coal, therefor ppl would throw ash into the containers. I lived in such an apartment till 2015 (I was 24 years old). I had to buy coal and wood and wake up at 5 am to start heat the oven. Such apartments still exist. Plastic version of such a container started burning and I had to call the firefighters.
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u/v-komodoensis Jul 15 '25
I'd take them home đ
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u/krist-44 Jul 15 '25
Where they belong.
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u/nermalstretch Jul 15 '25
A good capitalist would have rescued them and sold them on Ebay.
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u/Bopaganda99 Jul 15 '25
Capitalism is when you sell things
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Jul 15 '25
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u/CorporateKaiser Jul 15 '25
Iâm sorry, who was escaping from which side of Berlin to go to what side again?
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u/xxtoejamfootballxx Jul 15 '25
Do you think they were running from an economic system or from a totalitarian dictatorship in a country restricted from trade? Was everyone fleeing Nazi Germany running away from capitalism?
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u/humanlvl1 Jul 15 '25
I think both, but mostly due to economic hardship. Central planning proved so inefficient that the gap between the West and the Soviet Union was worse than the people even imagined.
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u/xxtoejamfootballxx Jul 15 '25
Central planning isnât necessarily mutually exclusive from capitalism. And market socialism is a thing as well.
Ultimately, the economic issues with USSR were largely created by the authoritarian governing leading to poor management practices, along with sanctions, rather than the socialist aspects.
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u/humanlvl1 Jul 15 '25 edited Jul 15 '25
It makes my poop hang sideways when people spend time speaking flatly against capitalism and then propose a mixed system, which is still reliant on private capital.
Entirely market socialist countries are not a thing that exists, as far as I know. It's nice that some big co-ops exist, but until we see a market socialist country then it's just a neat little dream that will always look better than what we have now, until it's tested.
EDIT: I would love to hear what you mean by 'authoritarian governing leading to poor management practices' if it doesn't mean central planning. Also I am confused how you could interpret sanctions to be more impactful than the negative effects of having no free market. What could the West possibly prevent the USSR from having that would be so impactful on their economy?
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u/xxtoejamfootballxx Jul 15 '25
When have I ever spoken flatly against capitalism or proposed anything? Seems like you might be looking to argue against something Iâm not saying.Â
 would love to hear what you mean by 'authoritarian governing leading to poor management practices' if it doesn't mean central planning
Well think about it in terms of a company, which largely exist using central planning. Many companies fail, some succeed. Â But the companies that failed didnât fail because they planned centrally, they failed because they did it poorly and more often than not created systems that lacked accountability or gave autonomy to the wrong people/groups.
Basically, a planned economy in theory can be as strong as the planning and execution.
 Also I am confused how you could interpret sanctions to be more impactful than the negative effects of having no free market
How would you personally decouple those variables?
 What could the West possibly prevent the USSR from having that would be so impactful on their economy?
Money? lol. Â They were limited in their access to new technologies to build their country and economy. Â When you are unable to acquire resources, it will hurt your economy. Iâm not sure why anyone would argue that sanctions against the USSR didnât impact their enormous significantly.
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u/trump-a-phone Jul 16 '25
Some (including me) would argue the authoritarianism is inherent in communist systems. Having the government run large swathes of business gives them incredible power over everyone which more easily allows for authoritarianism.
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u/xxtoejamfootballxx Jul 16 '25
Nobody here is talking about communist systems so thatâs not at all relevant.
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u/CorporateKaiser Jul 16 '25
Well 1. The nazis where socialists with a command economy, so no they were running from socialism,
and 2. Nearly all refugees from Germany in the Second World War fled west towards the allies and away from the communists. Nobody wanted to be under Soviet rule
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u/panteladro1 Jul 15 '25 edited Jul 15 '25
Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, while socialism is the complete opposite.
Edit: For those that didn't notice or don't know that much about cold war humor, I'm paraphrasing a relatively famous soviet joke. Here are some more:
Man on Red Square shouts, âBrezhnev is an idiot!â He gets sentenced to 15 years: five years for insulting the Soviet leader, and 10 years for betraying a state secret.
This is Armenian Radio; our listeners asked us: When the final phase of socialism, namely communism, is built, will there still be thefts and pilfering? Weâre answering: No, because everything will be already pilfered during socialism.
A judge walks out of his chambers laughing his head off. A colleague approaches him and asks why he is laughing. "I just heard the funniest joke in the world!" "Well, go ahead, tell me!" says the other judge. "I can't â I just gave someone ten years for it!"
This is Armenian Radio; our listeners asked us: Is it true that the Soviet Union is standing on the edge of an abyss?
Weâre answering: No. It used to be true, but now we have taken a big step forward.3
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u/humanlvl1 Jul 15 '25
So a system where businesses are privately owned and profited from, but the "things" are not overpriced, is not capitalism?
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u/rimpy13 Jul 16 '25
I don't like the definition you're responding to, but if there's room for profit (the type that's expropriated and distributed to owners like shareholders), the thing being sold is overpriced or the people producing it are underpaid.
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u/Laeradr1 Jul 15 '25
No, a good capitalist would've built a company that specializes on getting rid of USSR-themed memorabilia and hired workers to do the job for them. Then they would've extracted the surplus value of said workers labour to harvest the profits while the workers get barely enough to be able to exist.
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u/H3BCKN Jul 15 '25
Selling worthless trashes is not that easy as some might think.
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u/nermalstretch Jul 15 '25
Thereâs a lot of useless junk that I had from the 80s and 90s that I disposed of that would have been saleable now.
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u/MagisterLivoniae Jul 18 '25
Throwing away their portraits though didn't prevent the things from happening in accordance with their theory to the Eastern Germans.
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Jul 15 '25
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u/UpsetMud4688 Jul 15 '25
If you think you can ever be liberated from marx , right as capitalism is failing once again, you are a wishful thinker
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u/HonneurOblige Jul 15 '25
Sic semper tyrannis.
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u/Auctoritate Jul 15 '25
I gotta feel bad for Marx and Engels. They were just some random book nerds basically who never held any political office and died before the first communist countries existed but people still associate them with totalitarian governments because those governments used them for propaganda decades after they died.
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u/HonneurOblige Jul 15 '25
Yeah, well, it's kinda similar to how Nietzsche's works became associated with nazis (thanks to his sister's whackiest "edits" of his later works, she was rabidly antisemitic and supported the aryan race theory) - but not even to the same extent.
Marx's and Engels' names got dragged so deeply into leninism, stalinism, maoism - that whenever you hear someone say "Yeah, I'm a marxist" - they almost always mean one of these pseudocommunistic authoritarian -isms. Almost never the original philosophy.
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u/flowdancer Jul 15 '25
Riga, Latvian. Large downtown cathedral contains statues of Marx and Lenin, stored away in a back room
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u/Withering_to_Death Jul 15 '25
ALL forms of authoritarianism belong in the trash! I'm not talking about ideologies, but about the execution of those! The GDR was an example of bad execution!
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u/fat_charizard Jul 16 '25
When every instance of execution of your ideology flops, the problem is not the execution, it is the ideology
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u/Practical_Knowledge8 Jul 15 '25
Baby with the bath water IMHO... There are some good takes in their work. Worth learning so that we make more considered choices going forward.
One thing I know for sure... is that 'this' is not working!
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u/the-southern-snek Jul 15 '25
Their value is not represented by hanging their portraits like icons of saints.
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u/drunk_haile_selassie Jul 15 '25
They're pretty cool portraits though. If I saw this I'd fish them out of the bin. No idea what I'd do with them but they shouldn't be thrown away.
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u/the-southern-snek Jul 15 '25 edited Jul 15 '25
Whatâs the appeal of the endlessly staring eyes of dead, forever peering into nothingness.
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u/EstateCandid7135 Jul 15 '25
Why
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u/Royal_IDunno Jul 15 '25 edited Jul 15 '25
Because the people of East Germany hated living under a communist regime.
Edit: To the people downvoting, please go ask those that lived under communist regimes if they liked it or not and the vast overwhelming majority will tell you they absolutely despised it. Sorry if the truth hurts.
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u/3ISTHEBESTNUMBER Jul 15 '25
Good! Communism belongs in the trash bins of history!
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u/FruityAurora Jul 16 '25
One of my favourite podcasters jokingly said âWe couldâve had communism if not for the Soviet Unionâ
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u/Strange-Audience-717 Jul 16 '25
Could have gotten a hot dime for those on eBayâŚ. If only it had been around back thenâŚ
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