Life is a (Nude) Beach

Do old condoms or old jail cells more accurately present the past? Open since summer 2006, Berlin's DDR Museum aims to represent the flavor of daily life in the German Democratic Republic [Deutsche Demokratische Republik], by focusing on banal objects like, well, condoms. In contrast to other traces of “real existing socialism” in the GDR’s former capital, such as Hohenschönhausen, prison of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the DDR Museum displays only on the quotidian, the normal, the average. Or rather, normal aspects of life are presented in an exotic, “oohing-and-aahing-encouraged” fashion, as relics of a bygone era the museum’s website likens to ancient Rome or the Middle Ages. The brainchild of a corporate customer relations specialist, the museum, which is not publicly-funded but rather a for-profit corporation, is shamelessly self-promoting and according to detractors too reliant on a history-Lite approach that obscures darker realities. Yet it must also be praised for its hands-on emphasis and illumination of little-publicized aspects of life in the GDR.

The museum's exhibition fosters understanding of the ordinary by encouraging visitors to touch actual objects ranging from a restored Trabi, the GDR’s signature boxy automobile, to yellowing cookbooks and children’s toys. Designed to resemble the famous Plattenbau architecture of socialist planning (see Post Feb. 6), the exhibit transforms a dumpy, underground room alongside the Spree river into a series of small displays and informational plaques on topics ranging from blue jeans to kindergarten to vacation. Most of the displays are interactive and highlights include the afore-mentioned car as well as a small “movie theater” where a projector plays state-sponsored television.

All this combines to make like in the GDR seem, if not cushy, then at least not too bad. Indeed, such Alltagsleben receives a different treatment in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s widely-acclaimed film “Das Leben der Anderen” / “The Lives of Others” (2006), which opened in the United States last week. Here we see the main characters, GDR cultural crème-de-la-crème playwright Georg Dreymann and actress Christa-Marie Sieland (played by Sebastian Koch and Martina Gedeck) enjoy their success with a birthday party whose small-talk and chintzy gifts seem to resemble a typical bourgeois Western fête. In the West, however, the host would not have to break up a spat between one guest accusing another of being a Stasi informer.

Yet the museum claims not to take part in the current ostalgie trend sweeping Germany, wherein life under an oppressive dictatorship that employed 90,000 citizens just to open the mail is either mourned for its loss or misrepresented as a world of quaintly unhip consumer products (see Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 film Goodbye Lenin!). The exhibition certainly walks a fine line, allotting a tackily expansive display about nude bathing equal room as a corner addressing the Stasi’s surveillance.

This light-hearted and accessible approach has won the museum many fans, as its own advertisements will tell you, quoting a guestbook entry that calls it, “One of the most interesting museums in the world.” The populist self-promotion doesn’t stop once you’re inside, where entrance wall text adopts a friendly, slick tone straight out of PR to brief visitors on the well-conceptualized tactile world they are about to discover. Naturally, a poster of the aforementioned guestbook quote is also available in the gift-shop, doubtlessly to complement the just-completed “voyage of discovery through the daily life of a past time.”

None of this slick strategizing should be surprising, given founder Peter Kenzelmann’s roots as a self-styled motivational speaker. But while being put off by the occasional tastelessness is acceptable, using this disdain to dismiss the museum’s achievements is not. Apparently, people do feel as though they are learning something they couldn’t get elsewhere in the time they spend fingering old junk and reading simply-worded wall texts. An employee of the museum who preferred not to be identified claims that “ninety-five percent” of visitors walk away satisfied, and admits that in relation to his own upbringing in East Germany, the exhibit feels fairly accurate. The main inaccuracy? A small section linking the childcare system’s collective potty-breaks to contemporary right-extremist violence.

“That’s just not right,” explains the elderly ex-DDR-Bürger before the display case containing small models of children sitting on toilets.

As the kids demonstrate, the exhibit doesn’t veer from the obviously sensational, or perhaps even historically fuzzy. In fact, a book published by Dr. Stefan Wolle, Head of Research, was criticized by peers for not providing enough academic sources for his discussion of everyday life. Whoops.

Regardless of the museum’s less-than-heavy analysis and overtly shrewd business sense, Mr. Kenzelmann was right in identifying a certain absence in the memory landscape. While jails, security centers, and memorials rightly expose the injustice of a corrupt regime, the GDR was not pure, grueling oppression for each of its citizens. There were some who believed in the rhetoric of social progress, betterment, and equality as much as those on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but they hoped they had found a better solution. This museum brings the nobility of that hope to light. It is a small light, but an important one for understanding, as the museum phrases it, “a culture of a past time.” To this end, some of the wall texts are notable in their striving for historical fairness and are at times is at times quite successful, as in the discussion of the halfway emancipation of women who were able to work yet still responsible for picking the kids up from state-provided daycare.

A trip to the DDR Museum is certainly worthwhile; it would be a lie to hide behind high-brow definitions of culture and deny that the normal material detritus of a society imparts an aesthetic and physical understanding not easily gleaned from well-cited textbooks. It would also be a shame not to acknowledge that the “other” system, that which lost to today’s reigning capitalism, wasn’t motivated by strikingly similar ideals. Yet in its striving to present the quotidian and not the cruel, the DDR Museum nearly forgets that the lines between these categories are often blurry, as the birthday party in “The Lives of Others” so aptly shows. To resolve this tension, a museum visit is best followed by a viewing of von Donnersmarck’s suspenseful and richly-layered film, not so much as an antidote but rather a complement, a secret-police inflected yin to the naked-beach yang.