Bringing Communism Back to Life

Berlin Exhibit Gives Kids Glimpse of East Germany

By Emma Bullimore

For kids living in Germany today, the former East Germany is just something they read about in history books. Using diaries, clothes and videos, a new exhibition at a Berlin museum is showing them just what it was like to grow up when the Wall still stood.

Almost anywhere you look in Berlin these days, there is some sort of event or exhibit marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But an exhibit at the FEZ children's museum in the southeastern Berlin neighborhood of Schöneweide is unique in its focus on teaching younger audiences about the day-to-day reality of their East German predecessors.

The interactive exhibition, entitled "So, what was the GDR?", runs until Dec. 20. It invites children seven and older to step through a secret door into the realm of youth in a recreated GDR, as communist East Germany was officially known. There, they can meet eight real East German teenagers from their preserved audio clips, diary entries and other period objects.

From them, visitors can learn that Matthias, for example, dreamt of travelling beyond the confines of the Eastern Bloc and that Robert wanted to swap his comic books for more exciting Western toys. Likewise, although many prefer to remember the GDR as being a regime marked by restrictions and ideological conformity, not all of the teenagers felt so anxious about life. Uwe, for example, was a member of the FDJ, the official socialist youth organization, and aspired to become a party official.

Then there's Angela, whose love of punk rock made her a target for the Stasi, East Germany's much-dreaded secret police. The exhibit displays her Stasi file next to a mock-up of the cell she was subsequently imprisoned in.

But the curators of the exhibition were careful about presenting East Germany as something more than just a police state. "To present the GDR only in terms of the Stasi would be to simplify what life was really like," Marion Gusella, the museum's spokeswoman, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "We see every day how this happens in the public eye, but life in the GDR was about more than (the Stasi)."

The team behind the exhibition also emphasizes the importance of teaching young people about the former East/West divide, which is an important part of the German cultural identity.

For example, Susanne Lehmann, who works as a guide at the museum, says: "For me, it's important that (visitors) understand political rule as a construct, something that is not simply fact but, rather, something that can be challenged -- the result of human decisions." And she points out that the exhibit has been carefully designed to help convey this understanding of society and power.