The New Yorker:

One of the most popular tourist attractions in Berlin is the D.D.R. Museum, which opened in 2006 and aims to show visitors what life was like for ordinary people in the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The museum uses interactive installations and cleverly designed displays of documents, photographs, and household goods to summon the recent past. Schoolchildren line up for the opportunity to sit in the driver’s seat of a Trabant simulator, to perch on a couch in a reconstructed East German apartment, or to see examples of the games played and the foods eaten by Germans who lived behind the Iron Curtain.

The exhibits are generally fascinating, although embarrassed middle schoolers may scoot quickly by the extensively illustrated display dedicated to the East German enthusiasm for nudism. The less savory aspects of the East German regime are chillingly represented: there’s a mock interrogation room of the sort that would have been used by the Stasi, and a prison cell with a grim, narrow bed, underlining the brutality of the regime for anyone who crossed the secret police. The descriptive panels accompanying the displays, which are in German and English, often have an oddly pejorative, snarky tone, even in exhibits on the more benign aspects of everyday East German life. In a re-created kindergarten classroom with books, wooden cars, a shoe rack, and a linoleum floor, the wall text notes that attending kindergarten was an exercise in conformity rather than an opportunity to develop individual skills—presenting the fact that children were all required to nap at the same time as damning evidence of a repressive state, as opposed to an eminently sensible practice observed by caregivers of small children in societies even as capitalistic as the United States.

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