STASI MUSEUM - BERLIN
Spy Headquarters of the East German State Security
It is a little off the beaten track, in an unassuming neighborhood of the former East Berlin. For 40 years the Ministry of State Security (the STASI) controlled the lives of millions of East Germans through intimidation, arrests, disappearances and especially by having citizens spying on one another, as illustrated in the film “The Lives of Others”. The Stasi Museum is located in the former spy headquarters office complex where the GDR security apparatus operated since it was built in 1960 until the end of the socialist state and reunification in 1990.
Almost less a museum than a step back in time. The offices of the Stasi are essentially as they were left, as if the workers went to lunch and never came back, furnishings and spy equipment intact, locked safes in nearly every office standing open and emptied, the secrets once held there gone. The ghosts of Lenin and Marx still haunt the place as their busts still watch over the vacant offices.
The State Security machine considered itself the “Sword and Shield” of the Socialist Union Party which ran the country, and conducted its vision of a four decades fight against the “enemies of the state”, those citizens who refused to follow the rules of conformity demanded by the regime. A highly sophisticated network of internal spies, utilizing hidden cameras, listening devices, and the ordinary human beings reporting the activities of neighbors, co-workers and even family members.
The main exhibits of the Stasi Museum are presented in House 1, the main headquarters office building of 4 floors of offices, conference rooms, waiting rooms and interrogation rooms. The office of the Minister of State Security, Erich Mielke, the East German version of J Edgar Hoover, who ran the Stasi from 1957 until 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down, remains as he left it. The minister's offices (the Mielke suite) as well his under-ministers have been almost completely preserved in their original condition.
Other exibits illustrate the nature of the control of a people through. In East Germany the emphasis on the values of “Tradition Work” the ideological education in the Stasi operatives aimed at forming a "Checkist personality" with the core value of unconditional loyalty “to the working class and the Marxist-Leninist party". In one exhibit room you hear children songs aimed to shapre young minds toward the party ideal, while in another will be the spying apparatus, hidden cameras and microphones, sometimes clever and technologically advanced , and sometimes absurd surveillance spying devices, like the fake tree camera. A new permanent exhibit is being planned to open in late 2014.
Visiting the Berlin Stasi Museum
Open hours are Monday to Friday 10 am to 6 pm, Weekends and Holidays 12 pm to 6 pm. Admission cost is €5 for adults, €4 Seniors and Concessions, €3 for Students. To get to the Stasi Museum, take the U5 subway directly from Alexanderplatz to the station "Magdalenenstraße" or the S-Bahn Ringbahn to "Frankfurter Allee". It’s a five or ten minute walk from the stations to the complex at Ruschestraße 103. It’s a large apartment complex of the formal east block architecture through a courtyard with former security gates now gone, having lost the pure intimidation factor it once would surely have exuded. © Bargain
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Stasi Museum
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See Also:
OSTEL - BERLIN’S DDR DESIGN HOSTEL
