When the Berlin Wall finally toppled, East Germans disposed of their communist era goods and lifestyle as fast as humanly possible.
The change was so thorough that visitors to eastern Berlin today have to search very hard to find artifacts from the communist era. In fact, it is difficult to tell which side of the city you happen to be on if you don’t have a map handy; the former East has been westernized that much.
Fearful that all remnants of the communist era would eventually disappear, curators began collecting material from the period and have now organized a museum detailing what life was under communism.
The recently opened GDR Museum in Berlin houses 10,000 items donated by those who lived through this period. The museum highlights the mundane, the horrific, and the absurd.
Visitors can step into a replica of an East German apartment loaded with communist goods which have otherwise disappeared from society. Other exhibits reveal the insidiousness of the secret police, the crappy engineering behind East German automobiles, the bland packaging of consumer goods, and countless other reminders East Germans would rather forget.
While the museum has mostly been designed with tourists in mind, many East Germans I’ve met have a strange nostalgia for the period and will most likely visit the exhibits as well. “Not everything was bad in the GDR,” my friends often tell me. They fondly, and perhaps selectively, remember the foods of their youth and a handful of other consumer items which no longer exist. A visit to the GDR Museum will be a nice trip down memory lane for such people–as long as they avoid the Stasi exhibit.