Berlin's DDR-Alltagskultur museum

In Berlin, the privately-financed Museum zur DDR-Alltagskultur, a museum about every day life in the former GDR, has opened. Harry Nutt reviews the museum in the context of the ongoing debate about how to deal with the GDR past. "One argument put forward in this debate is that the authentic sites of GDR dictatorship are being pushed to one side to make way for kitschy reconstructions of everyday life featuring GDR traffic lights and culty Trabis. Unfortunately, this private museum is no exception in its portrayal of everyday GDR culture. The term "confronting the past" is too programmatic to be used to describe this harmless collection of exhibits. The bugged corner, which is supposed to represent the Stasi's surveillance apparatus, is quaintly reminiscent of the attempts of teenagers in East and West to get recordings of the latest rock songs on tape."

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