John Feffer explores the split personality of Berlin’s official GDR Museum…

The GDR Museum in Berlin is actually two museums in one. And these two parts, both devoted to everyday life in the German Democratic Republic, subtly contradict one another.

That might not have been the intention of the museum founders. But this tension actually captures the ambiguities of East Germany and the ambivalence that many Germans feel today about the erstwhile communist state.

The experience inside the main part of the museum is quite interactive. You can put on headphones and watch TV shows from East Germany, walk into an interrogation room and a prison cell, and sit at a high-ranking bureaucrat’s desk. You can take a test of your Russian. You can vote in a rigged election.

This part of the museum is also full of objects from East Germany that people either donated or sold to the curators. These objects are very cleverly arranged in the rather small exhibition space. Cabinets and closets lining the wall and dividing up the space are grouped according to topic: clothing, music, books, industrial production, nude beaches and so on. You can peer into glass cases at consumer products that have faded into history such as Wald Gold liquor and Florena Cream.

But you are also encouraged to pull out drawers and open cabinets to reveal even more objects, such as a floor plan of a GDR apartment or a report from the state security (Stasi). In this way, you feel as though you are uncovering a hidden society, which is appropriate since the society was largely hidden from Western eyes for many years.

If you don’t read the accompanying descriptions, you could walk away from this part of the museum feeling that you had just seen an objective portrait of a society. And according to the ticket seller that chatted with me, most people rate their experience at the museum v…