By Susan Stone in Berlin
Berlin already has no shortage of landmarks to the former Communist East Germany. There's the tourist-clogged Checkpoint Charlie, the imposing architecture of Karl Marx Allee, the Stasi archives documenting the extreme surveillance methods of the East German secret police, a kilometer-long stretch of the Berlin Wall painted by artists (the East Side Gallery) and the TV tower (Fernsehturm) at Alexanderplatz -- with its retro souvenirs, revolving restaurant and grumpy waitresses.
But until this month, you couldn't find a single museum in the former Cold War capital dedicated to the former East Germany. The new DDR Museum, which opened in Berlin last week, caps a trend of "Ostalgie," that went mainstream in 2003 with the sentimental international hit film "Goodbye Lenin." The movie was one of the first to gloss over the dark side of Communism to look at how most people led their day to day lives. Today, these everyday lives of a lost land have been reassembled in this new Berlin collection.
The inspiration for the museum came after its brainchild, Peter Kenzelmann of the western German city of Freiburg, grew frustrated during a visit to Berlin after searching in vain for a museum dedicated to the former Communist East. In 2003, he set out to build his own using private funding.
The collection is highly personal one -- culled not from the country’s archives, but from its attics. Almost all of the approximately 10,000 artifacts amassed by the DDR Museum have been donated by locals -- many of whom learned about the project after reading newspaper articles about it. They come everyday, cleaning out garages and spare rooms. Many of the objects are mundane -- bottles of kitchen cleanser, Hungarian wine, you name it. But everything is meticulously photographed and catalogued for possible future exhibition.
Rather than the classic timeline of history provided in most museums, Kenzelmann and the museum's project manager, Robert Rückel, sought to organize the collection by themes -- family, school, work or vacation, for example. Rückel said the museum also introduces some of the darker elements of Communist life within these thematic exhibits -- realities like ubiquitous surveillance, stringent regulations and, well, that prickly Wall. “We don't present you with the specific subject of the Berlin Wall," Rückel says. "Instead, we look at the border situation, and how that affected daily life as people went to work or on vacation. You couldn't take a trip to France or the United States, but you could instead go to Poland or the Baltic Sea.” Personal photographs and consumer goods like telephones and hairdryers also provide a slice of daily DDR life.
"We won’t be putting everything in display cases," Rückel says. "If there's a sofa, you should be able to sit on it. If it's a car, you should be able to get into it. It's really a special feeling to sit in an old East German Trabant, to hear what it sounded like and experience what it smelled like."
White-washing history?
But the DDR Museum has no shortage of powerful critics. And some fear that it's cheerful depiction of life in the East will whitewash a history that was also filled with political oppression and the killings of dissidents and others who sought to escape East German tyranny.
Speaking just before his museum opened its expansive exhibition of 20th century Germany, German Historical Museum spokesman Rudolf Trabold dismissed the DDR Museum project as shallow Ostalgia. "There's really no need for this museum," he fumed. "The focus is too narrow. It's on the level of 'Goodbye Lenin' -- it's filled with consumer goods from the DDR but there is no context. It's sort of like saying, 'Oh, wasn't it all nice?'"
Even Rückel admits that the museum is riding on the tailend of a wave of Ostalgie. During the first part of the decade, Germans were washed over by a warm wave of Ostalgie fueled by the success of German films like "Goodbye Lenin," which offered a feel-good stroll through life in East Germany. It's the side of East German life that many are more keen to remember than the Stasi chapter. In a reunified country where unemployment can run as high as 20 percent in some eastern regions, many would prefer to remember the fact that, in East Germany, at least every adult had a job. And for a time, trendsetters in cities like Berlin and Cologne could be seen sporting t-shirts with the logos of East German products, its former state airline, Interflug, the ubiquitous "DDR," the popular "Sandman" children's character and other relics of the past.
In recent months, however, Germans have been taking a more sober look at East German history. After a 14-year debate over its future, when the city of Berlin finally began demolishing the Palast der Republik, few here even bothered to bat an eyelash. Instead, the viewing platform setup so that people can watch its slow destruction has become a popular attraction for locals and tourists alike. And recent films like "Das Leben der Anderen" ("The Lives of Others") have depicted the DDR as it really was for many: a terrifying police state that monitored and persecuted tens of thousands of its citizens.
The DDR Museum, with its nostalgic bent, including a café where visitors can enjoy East German treats like Vita-Cola, doesn’t quite fit into this new vision. But the museum doesn't let you forget the troublesome past, either: In one room, set up to recreate a typical DDR living room, visitors' conversations are bugged, and people standing in another corner of the museum get their chance to play Stasi while eavesdropping with headphones.
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