The ‘100 Westmark’ project

Regina and Waldemar (born 1959 and 1957)

We bought this overpriced radio for DM60 or 70. It was broken in no time. We didn't know what we were doing back then

Anna and Klaus (born 1925 and 1940)

We bought an oil heater. We wanted a bit of comfort, where we wouldn't always have to shovel fuel into the oven

Bastian (born 1975)

The Game was my fourth Queen album. I bought a CD player soon after and scrapped my record player

Frank (born 1972)

I bought myself a leather jacket for motorcycling. When I got a new car, I stopped wearing it so often

Gertrud (born 1929)

I bought myself this jumper, which I still only wear on holidays. I keep it in a plastic bag to protect it

Helga (born 1956)

When I think of Gabriela Sabatini, I don't necessarily think of a good scent, but I like her perfume – or I did back then

Horst (born 1952)

I used some of my wife's and my two sons' welcome money to buy this drill. It's a tool that's useful for the whole family

Lother (born 1927)

At the time, I needed some new braces

Silvio (born 1972)

I bought myself a tennis racket. The big victories never came, unfortunately. Today it is rarely used

Heike (born 1974)

I didn't want to use my brother's bike helmet any more

Horst (born 1950)

I saved most of my welcome money, but later bought this angle-grinder. They were in short supply in the East

Rainer (born 1957)

I wanted jeans from the west. Even as they started to get holes, I wore them to the bitter end around the house

Monika (born 1947)

I thought back then that a double pack would be especially cheap

Roberto (born 1979)

My parents cashed my welcome money, and I got to choose the Walkman

Birger (born 1953)

On this album – Wolf Biermann meets Wolfgang Neuss – the two artists are at their best. Neuss imagines unification from a West German’s point of view: enjoying a cheap holiday in Bulgaria

Katharina (born 1981)

My parents gave me a Barbie doll for Christmas 1989, bought with some of my welcome money. Then I got another one from relatives in the west. Now I'm not sure which is which

Brigitte (born 1947)

I can't give you any information because I didn't collect my welcome money. Yes, this also happened!

The Berlin Wall was 14 years old when Peggy Meinfelder was born in 1975, and she was 14 when it fell. The young East German watched it come down on television and then, two days later, went with her father and sister to visit the West – in nearby Bavaria. “I was very conscious of the fact that we were making history,” recalls Meinfelder. “I forced myself to look at everything very carefully, until I got eye-ache.” After queueing for several hours to cross the border, they then joined the next queue, to pick up their DM100 Begrüssungsgeld (or “welcome money”) given to every easterner by the West German government.

Near the queue, locals were doling out used toys and bananas (the West Germans believed the East Germans didn’t know what bananas were). “But we had bananas from Cuba,” Meinfelder says in exasperation. “Then the toys. Why used toys? It was so demeaning. I’m sure they meant well, but can’t you see how on this first day the misunderstandings started?”

Nearly 10 years later, during a degree course in product design in Stuttgart, Meinfelder was asked to make a machine that “dramatised the exchange” at the heart of commerce. She constructed a foot-high box with a banana-shaped slit on the top and a tomato-shaped hole on the bottom. “At first, I was just amused by the idea of swapping a fruit for a vegetable, yellow for red, long for round,” says Meinfelder.

But the more she thought about it, the more her first artwork spoke to history. “It seemed this was how I experienced reunification. First, everyone wanted it – that was the banana. And then the trouble started, that was the tomato.” In 1991, when disgruntled former East Germans protested at the large-scale closures of their factories, a tomato was thrown at the country’s Chancellor, Helmut Kohl.

It wasn’t just older East Germans who were disoriented by the sudden changes, says Meinfelder. “On the one side, we saw the failure of our parents’ generation, and on the other side, we were suddenly being told, ‘You can become anything you choose’. But how were we to do that without any role models to emulate?”

In 2002, Meinfelder began work on what would become her “100 Westmark” project, part of which is shown here. She asked people from her home town and region to donate the items they bought with their Begrüssungsgeld – and to reminisce about that time.

“The people where I came from suddenly had a voice,” she says. “These objects show the reaction – they are the reaction – of East German citizens [to their new situation]. They are symbols of the new order.”

She points to a photo of two white shirts and the accompanying words of Monika J, born in 1947. Monika says she bought them because she thought “a double pack would be especially cheap”. Meinfelder looks up. “Isn’t that amazing?” she says. “She’s trying to adapt. We never had sales in East Germany, because the idea was that everything was always available at a fixed price.”

What did Meinfelder buy with her welcome money? She frowns. It was a pair of trainers and a sweatshirt with a slogan on it which she didn’t think about at the time. “Later, I saw it again in my mind’s eye and I was annoyed that I had worn it in such an unthinking way,” she says. So what was the slogan? “Be free.”

Gerrit Wiesmann is the FT’s Frankfurt correspondent