The Banality of Communism
Most people recognize the chilling iconography of lived communism: the gulag, the tank, the machine gun, the wall. The genius of Berlin's six-year-old DDR Museum lies in focusing instead on the more mundane details of everyday life in the former police state known as the Deutsche Demokratische Republik.
Here we see East Germans' plastic toilets and beloved (if comically underpowered) Trabant cars, watch their deadening newsreel propaganda, and witness serial attempts to express the tiniest amounts of individualism under the suffocation of enforced solidarity. From regime-unapproved garden gnomes to mass vacation nudity, communism's captives never stopped trying to make the best of a bad system. As a caption to the nudism section memorably phrases it, "It was almost, but not quite, an adventure."
Tucked in a bunker-like space in East Berlin, the DDR is notable for one other achievement: Unlike most museums in town, it is privately owned. —Matt Welch
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
recognition for the additional information
http://azcrusher.com
solidarity. From regime-unapproved garden gnomes to mass vacati