New Berlin museum captures those old Stasi days

"There must be a microphone around here someplace," to pick up the comments, one visitor said at Berlin's newest museum, speaking with a British accent. And indeed there was, this being the DDR Museum DDR being the initials for German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. Its State Security Service, after all, was listening all the time. The microphone is hidden in a mockup of a typical East German apartment listening to people when they are "at home," in other words and it broadcasts to another corner of the museum, decorated with a color photograph of the East German leader Erich Honecker.

There, visitors listen in on headphones. Then the same visitors will most likely go to the mock apartment, where they will be listened to. All part of the East German experience. "By the time you leave the museum, you've been both a perpetrator and a victim," said the museum's founder and director, Peter Kenzelmann, explaining his wish that a visit to the DDR Museum will be both an intellectual and an emotional experience. "It's not an exhibition about the Stasi," Kenzelmann said, using the German initials for the State Security Service. "You could say that not everything was about the Stasi in East Germany, but at the same time there was nothing without the Stasi." It is strange that Berlin, a city of many great museums, has until now had no museum devoted exclusively to the German Democratic Republic, the East German state that formed a part of the Soviet Bloc from the end of World War II until reunification in 1990. True, there is the German Historical Museum, just down Berlin's broad and leafy Unter den Linden, which opened a few weeks ago after many years of debate and organization. The Historical Museum, which has attracted enormous crowds of visitors in its first few weeks, shows the whole history of Germany, from Roman times to the present, and it includes a sizable section on East Germany. But three years ago, when Kenzelmann, who comes from the city of Freiburg in southern Germany, visited Berlin for the first time, he was struck by the absence of an East German museum, and even more struck by the fact that there are East German museums, albeit very small ones, in some smaller German towns, in Holland and even one in Culver City, California. Kenzelmann decided to do something about that. He invested some money of his own along with some from friends. Other funds came from a bank loan. Meanwhile, Kenzelmann collected some 10,000 objects, from condoms to a phone-tapping machine to the movie projector used in the office of the State Council, that were part of life in East Germany.

And a few days ago, his private museum, along the Spree River opposite the Berlin Cathedral, opened for business. On its first day, about a thousand people came, paying an entrance fee of 5, or $6.30. They decidedly do not go through some sort of labyrinth of Communist horrors. Indeed, some commentators in the German press have complained that the museum goes a little light on East Germany's political oppression, to which Kenzelmann and others connected with the museum retort that the charge is just not accurate. The museum's display of 600 objects on continuous view maintains a balance between the political and the everyday. It portrays the Trabant, for example, the little car that was the epitome of East German consumerism, with a sort of wry affection. It was no Mercedes or BMW surely, but the unpretentious and serviceable Trabant got people around in East Germany, and they appreciated it. The red telephone sitting on a table in the living room comes with a recording "You won't believe it, but I have a telephone!" a man says, reflecting the fact that it would take a couple of years or longer to get one. Other exhibitions are on the East German mania for nude bathing a freedom that actually was considerably reduced by new regulations after reunification. There are displays on East German rock bands, ordinary consumer products and on the press, with this barbed comment: "Despite 39 newspapers, 2 TV channels, and 4 radio stations, there was only one opinion." And then there is the museum's small display of surveillance machinery, a television used for public spaces, a phone-tapping machine complete with cassette recorder, and the microphone used to receive signals from a bug placed in a private home. An explanatory note gives a brief but telling picture of the machinery of surveillance, saying that at the time East Germany fell, the Stasi had 93,000 full-time employees and 173,000 "unofficial collaborators."

Some 250,000 people were convicted of political crimes between 1950 and 1989, and many of them the museum doesn't give a figure were executed. The entire East German population was about 17 million. "I have several different emotions. I saw so many products that I used to use, and if I saw them in the stores again, I'd definitely buy them," said Annerose Runde, a schoolteacher from the former East Germany who was visiting the museum in the company of her sister, Ute Schiffler, a social worker. "On the other hand, there were so many restrictions and these also come back to mind," Runde continued. The sisters were asked about the Stasi and whether it created a fear in them that was also part of everyday life. "We didn't really feel we were being observed," Runde said. "We had other things to do than worry about the Stasi, like just getting what we needed in everyday life. But after reunification we looked into our files, and we were surprised at how much information about us there was in them." Once, for example, the two East German sisters arranged to meet in Prague with a third sister, who lived in Hamburg in West Germany. The files showed that the Prague apartment was bugged. "It was just a family conversation, but they must have suspected something because they bothered to listen," Runde said. "It made us feel a little strange, because somebody in our family must have told them about the meeting, but we never found out who it was."

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