The exhibition VEB Museum offered a journey through the working and everyday life of the GDR. Although the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum was not a classic publicly owned enterprise, as an institute under the authority of the GDR Ministry of Health, it reflected state-controlled health education, served as a venue for public events, and operated as a production site with around 300 employees. In this way, the museum was far more than a conventional exhibition space.
The exhibition conveyed the central importance of the working world in the lives of people in the GDR, the power ambitions of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), the growing environmental problems of the 1980s, and the cultural everyday life between conformity and protest – painting a multifaceted picture of a vanished reality.
Several loans from the Archive, the Art Collection (Kustodie), and the Anatomical Collection of the Dresden University of Fine Arts enriched this exhibition.
