An interactive experience
One of the most interactive museums in the world, the DDR Museum gives you the chance to experience a little of what everyday life behind the Berlin Wall was like in the former East Germany. Covering 47 topic areas and spread over 1000m2, it covers living conditions, the Wall and the Stasi, and that’s just for starters. Visitors are encouraged to touch, feel and interact. Take a virtual drive in a Trabant, wander a high-rise 120 square metre tower block Plattenbau flat and play the many educational games. Try on the DDR clothes, browse and change the TV channels that were available during this era, and even use an original Erika typewriter. You’ll learn about Stasi surveillance techniques, really bringing the German Democratic Republic back to life.
Three themes
The DDR Museum in Berlin has three themed areas to explore. Public Life, State and Ideology and Life in a Tower Block. Each area presents the positives as well as the negative sides of living under the DDR.
A newer, temporary cabinet exhibit has opened and showcases the life of those born in the last year of the DDR as well as the important events of 1989. Called the Born in ’89 – Children of the Change, fascinating biographies uncover the lives of those marked by the fall of the Wall, nicknamed the ‘Wendekinder’.
Other interesting facts about the DDR Museum in Berlin
- The DDR Museum in Berlin was nominated for the prestigious European Museum of the Year Award due to its innovative design.
- There are over 200,000 objects in the DDR Museum in Berlin that need to be conserved.
- Most of the objects on display in the DDR Museum in Berlin were donated from thousands of private households.
- The DDR Museum in Berlin is the 11th most visited museum in all of Germany.
