Text in German. Over thirty years after the fall of the Wall, the anthology, which presents the results of an interdisciplinary conference organized by the Richard Schne Society for Museum History in the Kunsthalle Rostock in 2019, for the first time asks more fundamentally about the role of the museum as an institution in the GDR. Five chapters cut thematic aisles into the complex field of East German museum historiography between 1949 and 1989: from museum-political framework structures and international museum relations to specific forms of museum design and system-related collection strategies to the function of individual museum types. By considering different phases of GDR history - from the SBZ and early GDR to the Ulbricht period to Honecker and the 1980s - the publication also points to changes and developments as well as possible niches and free spaces. Richly illustrated, with a lot of source material and a first complete bibliography, the volume paints a multi-layered picture of a very individual GDR museum history, which has always been flexibly adapted to political requirements and which today has to be dealt with in a differentiated way in the German museum landscape.