The Stasi Museum in Berlin
Just the sight of the Stasi Museum makes my heart drop.
It could be an affectation - I’ve written before about how I have a tendency to manufacture emotional reactions to history - but looking at it feels awful. A familiar kind of awful - the crappy-carpet fluorescent-lit misery of a deserted secondary school or a hospital. The dread of stepping into an institutional space and feeling yourself becoming something less than fully human.
The museum’s housed in the former Stasi headquarters in Berlin. The building is - of course - nondescript. A shit-brown block, with wings added to it on either side, as new pretexts for surveillance occurred to the government of the GDR.
Inside the building there are lots of houseplants. Why are there houseplants?
In every other way the Stasi Museum feels like any public sector building. It’s incredible how inhuman endeavours can take on the veneer of state legitimacy with the right kind of office furniture.
I feel duty-bound to point out that the Stasi Museum is, in many ways, not a particularly good museum. The wayfinding is pretty poor, the interpretation is ordered in a system that’s hard to fathom, and it suffers from an excess of exhibits (one of the things that the Jewish Museum in Berlin taught me is that less is very often more). Some of those problems can be attributed to the building itself - obviously it isn’t a built-for-purpose museum - but some of them are issues of curation. It’s tempting to ruminate on the faults of the museum as somehow metaphorical for the condition of the GDR, but that would be a little too neat. I’ve seen much better examples of museums that exist on very similar lines - the Museum of Occupations in Vilnius springs to mind.
There are plenty of this kind of museum in Europe.
If you’re a totalitarianism tourist, as I am, and you’re only in Berlin for a brief time, then I would suggest visiting The Topography of Terror instead (the latter, incidentally, is free, whereas I come away feeling slightly short-changed by the Stasi Museum’s entry fee of €8).
But, obviously, the Stasi museum is worth visiting - how could it not be? This year will mark thirty years since the fall of the Berlin wall. There are still little particles of living history clinging to the walls, stuck in the fibres of the carpets, lingering in the u-bend of the toilets. I feel reluctant to touch any of the handrails on the staircase, in case the history rubs off onto my hands. My palms feel gritty with the skin cells of people who were not fundamentally different from me, and who hounded and spied on their own neighbours and families.
One of the more lucid sections of the exhibition details the Stasi’s methods for exerting control over dissidents. It strikes me, not for the first time, how the tactics that a state uses for power and control are indistinguishable from the tactics of abusive individuals. Just look at this current example in Saudi Arabia - textbook technologically-facilitated coercive control, writ large into governmental infrastructure. In the GDR, one of the tactics for quashing dissent was referred to as ‘psychological harassment’.
One case study in the Stasi Museum tells of a woman who always came out of the supermarket to find that her bike tyres had been punctured. A pastor received frequent anonymous letters, telling him that his wife was cheating on him. A woman called Karin Ritter, who suffered from depression, would come home to find that her personal possessions had been moved around. Sh told her friends, and they laughed her and told her that she was going mad.
Eventually she took her own life.
Most of the museum, however, fails to make much of an impression on me, beyond the impression of cloying banality - institutional despair. The very specific wretchedness of seeing a hand-drawn plan of a home under surveillance, rendered in carefully colour-coded felt tip and hyper-neat handwriting, so it would be legible at a glance, like the child carefully completing their homework. Pictures of informants with the faces blurred out - because that’s someone’s uncle, someone’s mother-in-law, someone’s elderly neighbour who they get the shopping in for.
I buy a coffee in the most wretched museum cafe I’ve ever experienced. The chairs and tables seemed to have been repurposed from the GDR offices - and in a sense, why should they not be? You can’t preserve everything, after all.
Though, these kinds of places always make me wonder exactly who decides how far the preservation should go. Who comes in and decides that a paint job is required to tart things up, to keep everything looking ‘authentic’? I remember wondering that too at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where someone had clearly replaced sections of the barbed wire. What’s worse - to maintain that murderous boundary, or to give visitors the idea that there were ever gaps in the wire, that escape was possible?
The authorities of the Stasi Museum seem to espouse the latter way of doing things, if the cafe’s anything to go by. Of course, it would be obscene if the cafe at the Stasi Museum was nice, but it would be beyond the pale not to have a cafe at all. So they have one, and it’s perfectly horrible and perfectly appropriate, and Ordnung, at least, is maintained.
The coffee is vile, but I drink half of it to give myself a pretext for sitting there, and because I feel sorry for the woman behind the counter. Surely she doesn’t work all day in this sludge-brown room with barred windows?
I realise that the strangest thing, to me, is that some people still work in this building, still use the desks and the light switches and the toilets that provided the apparatus for the oppression of their parents and grandparents. I suppose that’s why they have so many houseplants. A concession to the humanity of the people who still have to work there.
After the vile coffee I leave. Life - not the shiny, performative kind, but the tatty old consumer capitalist life of euro stores and shopping malls - continues outside. The hum of spring is in the air in Berlin, like the strains of an orchestra tuning up before the symphony starts. On a patch of scrubland nearby a mother and her toddler crouch down to look at the little purple crocuses pushing obdurately through the earth.
I get the U-bahn back from the museum, because I want to get away from the site quickly. Lichtenberg is an area of Berlin unburdened by beauty. I’m naively pleased to notice that the U-bahn station is very convenient for the museum - and why should it not be? A lot of people used to work at the Stasi headquarters, and it wasn’t so long ago. They use the same public transport system that I use now. Maybe one of them lived in the flat that I now occupy. By 1989 the Stasi employed 90,000 people, and 2.5% of the population worked as informants.
Living in Berlin has given me a bad habit of looking at anyone in the supermarket or on the street over the age of say, fifty, and wondering if they were a Stasi informant. Because statistically, some of them must have been. I guess it says something about my own morbid nature that I never look at those same people and ask myself if they might have been part of the resistance.
