The Essay

Passports, garden chairs, cars or contraceptives. Four essayists from former Warsaw Pact nations reflect on the changing use and meaning of an apparently banal object - an object that unlocks a wider story about how daily life in their country was transformed by the dramatic events of 1989. In today's programme, the furniture curator Jana Scholze remembers her life in communist East Germany and the true meaning of garden furniture. Producer: Julia Johnson.