How Balanced is Our View?
Most people’s understanding of history is shaped simply by the easy availability of books on certain topics—and the perspectives those books prioritize. Take German history as an example. Walk into a typical North American chain bookstore, and you’ll find that over 90% of the titles in the German history section focus on the Nazi regime. Now, think about this for a second: Germany’s history spans over 2,000 years, yet those infamous 12 years dominate the shelves. It’s no wonder that many people conflate German history almost entirely with this brief, though utterly catastrophic, chapter—as if it were the centerpiece of the German people’s entire story. This highlights a larger issue: when specific topics or approaches are disproportionately represented, our understanding of the history of the place or era as a whole becomes skewed.
The same can be said about the public tour options you’ll have available to book when you visit Berlin. If you want to learn about the DDR, the communist state that formally began in 1949 and ended in 1990, you can take any number of tours which can be found easily online. But, there’s an interesting problem when you look at the selection of topics these tours explore.
Essentially, these tours can be grouped into two broad categories. First, you have «Cold War» tours which deal with spies, the Stasi and the Wall. Then you have «Wall Tours,» which deal with spies, the Stasi, and the Wall. You’re likely to hear about how awful the regime was, how absurd its institutions were, and you’ll come away thinking the only reason the DDR existed was so that people could risk their lives escaping from it, or to provide material for thriller writers to exploit.
Now, you might ask, is this wrong? Surely, the horror stories about being perpetually watched, about the penalties of non-conformity, and eternal shortages of basic goods were true and make for gripping stories. Yet what authors hoping to write bestsellers or tour providers hoping to sell tours miss is that there is simply more to the DDR story than the Wall and the Secret Police. If you learn only about the these elements, you’re in some ways missing the core of the story.
The DDR Museum
Luckily, modern Berlin offers you a chance to build out a more rounded picture of the what the Communist state was, what its daily realities were like and the surprising things it managed to accomplish. An essential first stop is the fantastic DDR Museum located just across the river from the Berliner Dom, on the site of a now demolished luxury communist era hotel.
You can begin your journey into the past by visiting their website https://www.ddr-museum.de/en and exploring the videos and blogs that are on offer. These are extremely well done and absorbing, and offer that much needed counter balance to «the DDR was the Wall» view you get on tours and in popular works of history.
In the museum itself, you can explore the cars people drove and how difficult the process was in getting one. The corollary to this was the fact that everybody who had a car by definition became a car mechanic as these vehicles had to be maintained and East Germans were very car proud. You can also visit a recreated living room and learn about how the population lived. These little nuggets, these mini-stories and little snapshots of the past, are endlessly fascinating. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself lingering for longer than you had planned!
The museum does an excellent job of presenting a balanced perspective on the DDR, avoiding any sugarcoating of its past. Its absurdities are on full display, but the exhibits also highlight an important truth: the DDR was home to ordinary people, living their lives, pursuing their goals, and finding joy where they could—just like people everywhere. It dispels the dramatic notion that every citizen spent their days plotting daring escapes over the Wall in smoke-filled basements. For those stories, the Checkpoint Charlie Museum is the place to go. Instead, the DDR Museum offers a broader, more relatable narrative: the everyday experiences of life in a unique and sometimes challenging nation.
The DDR Flat Museum
For those who want to delve deep and get a real taste of everyday life back then, a fantastic chance to do so exists in the form of the rather unique DDR Flat Museum (Museums Wohnung) located in the outskirts of the city in the Hellersdorf area in the larger area of Mahzahn at Hellersdorfer Str. 179,
Bear in mind that the museum is only open, as of this writing in November 2024, on SUNDAYS from 1400 to 1600 (2PM to 4PM). The staff primarily speaks German, but English signs are available to help you navigate and understand the exhibits. Chances are, you’ll have the place to yourself, creating a uniquely intimate and immersive experience.
The exhibition in located in a real DDR Platten Bau block of flats, which collectively were built under the rule of Erich Honecker from the very early 70s until the end of the regime. The government of Honecker declared that every family deserved its own flat, and building new mass-produced «flat pack» style structures was meant to relieve overcrowding in the city center, where many people were still living in the partial ruins of hastily repaired 19th and early 20th century housing stock that had been badly damaged in the war.
Today, we often view these plain, uniform apartment blocks with a mix of disbelief—how could something so uninspired have been built?—and contempt toward the regime that imposed them on its people. And not everyone in the DDR would have disagreed with you! However, for many at the time, these buildings symbolized progress and a dramatic improvement in living conditions. They offered modern amenities like hot water, private spaces, and relief from the cold, damaged buildings left over from wartime. Many of those older homes were riddled with bullet holes, heated by coal stoves, and shared communal toilets in hallways. For countless residents, these new flats represented a long-overdue upgrade to a more comfortable and dignified way of life.
Moreover, because flats were allocated by the government, anybody from high level state employees, to university lecturers to bus drivers and shop workers were all living together in one building. They found common ground and forged local identities, in ways that the economically segregated westerners could never imagine, with their rich and poor neighborhoods and mutual antagonisms.
The flat museum at Hellersdorfer Strasse lets you peak inside one of these original flats, restored to its DDR condition. You can also just marvel at the entire neighborhood, built up from scratch, far from the center, and designed ideologically for the purpose of creating a new type of person, one oriented to the community and to communist values. Taken together with the DDR museum in the center, you have a powerful set of experiences which really let you peak behind the propaganda and get a taste of what it was like to live in this long-vanished nation.
And it provides vital context to the tours focused exclusively on the Wall and the Secret Police. Context, as ever, provides us with the best insights.
