Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
The sensitive surveillance equipment hidden in the room picked up a comment about a box of condoms on display, and another about a red telephone. "I had one just like that," a man could be heard saying in German. Then came another voice speaking English with a British accent. "There must be a microphone around here someplace," it said.
Indeed there was, and the fact that the British visitor to Berlin's new DDR Museum DDR being the German initials for the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany could not find it was a nice touch of verisimilitude. East Germany's State Security Service was, after all, listening all the time, and most of the people listened to did not know it.
The microphone is someplace in a mock-up of a typical East German apartment, picking up people's conversations when they are "at home." It broadcasts to a corner of the museum where visitors, under a watchful photograph of the former East German leader Erich Honecker, listen on headphones. Then the same visitors can go to the mock apartment where it is likely that they will be listened to as well.
All part of the East German experience.
"By the time you leave the museum, you've been both a perpetrator and a victim," the museum's founder and director, Peter Kenzelmann, said, explaining his wish that a visit to the DDR Museum be both an intellectual and an emotional experience.
"It's not an exhibition about the Stasi," Kenzelmann said, using the common name 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 in a way 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 German reunification.
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 day, and it includes a sizable section on East Germany.
But three years ago, when Kenzelmann, who comes from 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 the Netherlands and even 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 about 10,000 objects, from condoms 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, situated along the Spree River opposite the Berlin Cathedral, opened for business. On its first day, about one thousand people came, paying an entrance fee of 5, or about $6
They decidedly did 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, a charge Kenzelmann says is just not accurate.
The museum's display 600 objects will be on view at any given time 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 often took a couple of years or longer for East Germans to get one.
Other exhibitions are on the East German mania for nude bathing, a freedom that 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, two television channels, and four 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 and a phone-tapping machine. An explanatory note gives a brief but telling account 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." About 250,000 people were convicted of political crimes from 1950 to 1989, and many of them the museum does not give a figure were executed. The entire East German population was about 17 million.
"I have several different emotions," said Annerose Runde, a schoolteacher from the former East Germany who was visiting the museum with her sister, Ute Schiffler, a social worker. "I saw so many products that I used to use, and if I saw them in the stores again, I'd definitely buy them.
"On the other hand," Runde continued, "there were so many restrictions and these also come back to mind." The sisters were asked about the Stasi.
"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," she continued.
Once, for example, the two East German sisters arranged to meet in Prague with a third sister, who lived in West Germany. The files showed that the Prague apartment was bugged.
"It was just a family conversation," 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."
(C) 2006 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
