Simply beautiful?

Customs, traditional costumes, and folk songs are considered the epitome of “folk culture.” They have been and continue to be attributed aesthetic value. They simply seem beautiful—precisely because they appear so authentic and untouched by modernity.

However, perceiving “folk culture” as beautiful is only the result of a view shaped by modern viewing habits and ideologies. This is because the supposedly simple is often exaggerated in contrast to the culture of the bourgeois classes or capitalist commodity culture.

The exhibition shows aestheticized representations of folk culture from the Banat, Transylvania, and the Egerland regions from the 1920s to the 1960s. It reveals how the “folk culture” of the German-speaking population in and from Eastern Europe was used for political purposes – even after 1945.

A traveling exhibition by the Institute for Cultural Analysis of Germans in Eastern Europe (IKDE), Freiburg. Funded by the Ministry of the Interior, Digitalization, and Municipalities, provided by the state parliament of Baden-Württemberg.