Welcome to the DDR Museum, Berlin’s interactive museum
Berlin, Germany
Since its opening in 2006, the DDR Museum has become one of the most-visited museums in Berlin. A number of features make it unique.The DDR Museum is so much more than simply viewing objects behind glass. Visitors have to actively participate to experience the exhibition. They can touch objects, open drawers and closets. On their exhilarating journey back in time, they will find themselves discovering and feeling a range of different things in every corner of the museum. They land in the East German socialist past, where they get to know the realities of everyday life in a communist dictatorship. Experiencing history hands-on, our visitors are invited to question clichés and expand their knowledge about a bygone state.
As an entirely private company, the DDR Museum does not receive any state subsidies or other sources of funding. Financing its activities entirely by admission fees, this experiment has turned out to be successful. Maintaining the commercial viability of the museum, the management carefully reinvests profits into the museum’s facilities and exhibitions. Due to an increasing number of visitors, we extended the permanent exhibition in 2010 whereby the DDR Museum was again nominated for the European Museum of the Year Award in 2012 (first nomination in 2008). In 2016, the third part of the permanent exhibition, an originally furnished WBS 70-prefabricated building apartment, opened to the public.
The DDR Museum is the only institution of its kind to provide a holistic and interactive account of the conditions that prevailed in the East German dictatorship. From everyday life to political, military and economic structures, the museum conveys life in a dictatorship. Therefore, the exhibition shows history from the perspective of the population and focuses on the everyday consequences of the decisions made by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). From this perspective, “history from below” does not only show how people lived, shopped, ate and occupied themselves, but also how they were forced to negotiate a difficult path through the competing demands of loyalty to the state and the precepts of their own conscience. This cultural-historical approach is close to those who experienced this part of history and goes far beyond a mere presentation of historical facts.
The collection of the museum currently comprises about 300,000 objects, which are inventoried in order to make them accessible to external researchers, other cultural institutions and for research purposes. Most of the objects come from private individuals who donated their “prized possessions” to the museum. Thousands of different donors have preserved objects for posterity in this way.
more. www.ddr-museum.de