Wed 20 Nov - Berlin, Germany

Grim, grim day... DDR and Stasi... And rain...

Yep, we woke up to rain, and it didn't really stop at all during the day.

Today was the day when we wanted to explore life in DDR a bit further through a visit to the DDR Museum in the morning and to the Stasi prison in the afternoon.

The DDR museum is at the river Spree just off Karl-Leibknecht Straße and we walked there to arrive just after they opened at 10am.

It may not come across in this picture but there were several school groups at the DDR Museum at the same time, so it was a bit noisy and crowded in places as it wasn't a very big place. Location shot.

Our understanding of the museum is that it is supposed to show what life was like for DDR residents before the wall came down so the displays are of everyday things - car, food, work, housing, school etc with politics at the end.

By far the most interesting piece of DDR memorabilia is this, the Trabi car.

A synopsis about possibly the most memorable DDR symbol throughout the world. Hans certainly remembered it as a joke when he grew up in Sweden. To sum up the car was made cheap, to be inexpensive to residents and you got what you paid for - a 2 stroke engine where bits were left off that were considered "luxuries", like an engine cooling system! And the locals had to be on a waiting list to get a car, sometimes up to 16 years.

Yes, you can actually sit behind the wheel of the Trabant and pretend you are driving it in the former DDR...

Impressive dashboard wouldn't you say...

Comfort galore... Not.

Moving on and this corner was all about the East Germans' habit of doffing all their clothes when going to the beach... The speculation was that being naked was considered a non-conformity, as the government really didn't really like so the East German residents were basically "showing them the ass".

An East German bureaucrat's desk with the East Germany symbol.

Hot line to Moscow perhaps...?

These faces are looking pretty grim, are they not?

Of course, while the common East German punter would drive a Trabi (if they were lucky), if he could wing it, the East German elite drove, or more likely were driven, in stretched cars like this Volvo 264.

A listening and surveillance corner with good ol' Erich Honecker looking on...

Time to interrogate...

...well, there was only ever going to be one destination after that...

This is just sick. The board told the reader that East German kids were throwing wooden hand granades instead of balls. Why? Well, you know, practice for and when if the imperialists would attack...

We left the DDR museum after an hour and a bit at perhaps 11.30pm and felt that it didn't live up to expectations at all. A visit may have been different to anybody under the age of 40 who only have a limited knowledge of the old DDR but for us it was all old school. Nothing really new for us. For anyone who wants a feel of what it was like we recommend the movie "Good Bye Lenin!".

The museum also had a lot of text to read with some of it behind panels and in drawers that you had to pull out before you could read them. Not sure what the reasons for that would be. The Trabi was the highlight of course, but the rest was a bit so so.

For our next destination, the Stasi Prison, we needed to be there by 2.30pm as the only tour in English for today was kicking off then. That meant that we had a bit of time as the tram ride from Alexander Platz to Freienwalder Straße and then the walk to the prison would take about 30 minutes in total.

So, following our theme of retracing the movie "Bourne Supremacy" footsteps in Berlin, and DDR, we walked to Karl Marx Allee.

And yes, this was definitely East Berlin in the old days. More glorified communist murals...

So why Karl Marx Allee? Because the Moscow disco where the Russian assassin Kirill spends his time off (but then is informed that Bourne is alive) is here... And the place is actually called Moscow Restaurant although we think that it is closed down now.

And when Kirill steps out of the disco, this is what he sees, across Karl Marx Allee.

This is probably the door that Kirill came out of... We can't be totally sure.

A final location shot... With our DDR theme we could imagine yesteryear tanks rolling down Karl Marx Allee during 1st May parades...

OK, time for a lunch feed and we wander back to Alexanderplatz. We liked this sign...

For our lunch we ended up back at the Asian fast food joint under Alexanderplatz S-bahn station. Green curry chicken for Hans and Massaman chicken for Di. Not bad, but not brilliant either but reasonably cheap.

After lunch we took the tram M5 from Alexanderplatz to Freienwalder Straße station and then walked east on that street for perhaps 5 minutes to arrive at Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen as the full name of the Stasi Prison memorial and museum is called.

For those who don't know the Stasi is the short name given to the DDR Ministry for State Security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit). This prison was their central remand prison for political prisoners and was head office to the 11 other remand prisons the DDR had by 1989.

The approach looked grim and the overcast and rainy weather did not help...

A boarded up building with the only real colour coming from a Lidl sign...

And that same building from the other side.

We understood that a lot of the Stasi files were archived in this building and that the building was eventually stormed when the wall came down with residents looking for their files, then ripping them up and throwing them out through the windows. However many of the files were destroyed by the Stasi beforehand because this place was not on any map (more on that later).

The main gate to Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. We have arrived. Our smiles fade shortly into the tour...

Interesting... In the same "spirit" as life in East Germany perhaps, this is where you pay your €5 fee to enter the site.

Nobody was behind the counter to service us for a while, but note the 3 people in the background who were all working there but being to busy chatting among themselves...

The Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen has a permant exhibition that was suggested that we check out as we still had some spare time before 2.30pm when our tour would start.

Let's just say that the permanent exhibition was just too depressing after a little while and you could only take so much of East German surveillance, arrest without known charges, punishment "tool of trade" and encounters from former prisoners. An example here of 5 different types of cell doors...

This speaks for itself...

The paperwork for sentencing somebody to death... The person mentioned in the papers was also executed.

The tour started with all us punters being shuffled into a room to watch a 30 minutes documentary of what went on here at Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. Interesting, an eye opener, but very very grim.

Here we are waiting for all the punters to get their shit together so the actual tour can start. A quick photo of Hans in the rain. Sets the scene perfectly wouldn't you say?

Some rows of cell doors... This was the oldest section of Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen which closed in the early 50s. This basement level of cells were referred to as the U-boot or the submarine due to their underground and cramped conditions. Some cells were deliberately overheated to 36 degrees and others were freezing, prisoners were given uniforms that did not fit and were often left in complete isolation of days on end.

More of the same... Absolutely awful place...

And a cell with a "potty". Few of these cells had windows or any source of daylight.

The prisoners in the mid 50s were made to build a new prison as the authorities were worried about how the outer world would look at the model communist state having an outdated prison. Of course, that didn't alter the brutalities apart from psychological abuse largely replacing physical abuse (as it didn't mark a persons body).

BTW, we heard that no prisoner ever saw this central courtyard surrounding the prison during the Stasi era as they were always arriving here blindfolded and kept well away from seeing the outside world.

In the basement of the new building it was the same old story. The dumping ground for troublesome prisoners is these dark and padded cells and check out how thick the padding is.

And inside the cell it was dark, very very dark. Of course, the prisoner was often put here with a straight jacket on as well as blindfolded and left to his own devices for a long period. Very gruesome.

This small room was used to control comings and goings including who and what was going into the garage. Nice wall paper wouldn't you say? Apparently colorful, "high quality" wall papers were used for guards rooms, to help the staff morale.

Our guide Jessica is to the right.

And all gone...

This van not looking much for the world was anything but... It was used to transport prisoners, many times kidnapped in the middle of the night from their homes, with no information, to the prison. This van could hold up to 5 seperately kept prisoners in different compartments without any of them knowing that anybody else was there.

Many of these vans were also camouflaged to look like they were transporting fruit and vegetables and other everyday items so to not draw attention on the streets...

And this is how this van looked on the inside...

Another one of Stasi's many inventions was to have cell spies, prisoners spying on other prisoners. Not even inside you could get away from the state surveillance.

We heard about all the sinister tricks that went on in the interrogation room, which incidentally were more in numbers than cells here, but we will not repeat here apart from Di reenacting the start of the interrogation when the prisoner was made to literally stand in the corner, of course they would have looked only at the floor and been handcuffed behind their backs.

Apparently all the interrogation rooms looked slightly different with different decor apart from the desk setup which always looked like the below.

This enclosure is called a "tiger cage". 30 minutes "exercise" per day for the prisoners, come rain or shine or freezing -20 degrees Celsius. Or if you warranted punishment, the guards may "forget" about you...

The tour ended around 4.30pm and dusk was in progress. That, and in the rain, made Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen look even more sinister. A few final pics from the outside...

 

The front gate yet again...

A final few interesting points about this prison - yep, it was used right up until the wall came down and then the prisoners all walked out of here. The prison complex extended through many blocks of the suburbs because the surveillance and espionage of the people of east Berlin was supported from here. For example they opened 90,000 pieces of personal mail every day, and read it. The staff all led double lives, no one knew this place was here and it did not get marked on a map until 1992! The prison opened as a place to visit from 1994.

And yes, we truly had enough of this very depressing place as you can only take so much Stasi brutalism in one day. Tomorrow has to be something light hearted...

Back on M5 tram towards Alexanderplatz and to give this blog some more colour for today, this is the ticketing machine on the tram.

At Alexanderplatz it was still raining so we jumped underground and hopped onto U2 train for the 3 stops to our local train station at Spittelmarkt.

A final picture for tonight is of Hans on Leipziger Straße displaying the pitiful nature of his broken down cheap umbrella. Yep, it went from here to the bin.

Before going home, we stopped at our adjacent shopping centre yet again as Di picked up a few more food items and Hans bought himself a new umbrella (€3) and 2 double CDs for the mighty price of 50 cents each, one with Mozart classical tunes and one with smooth jazz.

Hey, even if we only play them tonight and donate them for the next guest to enjoy, we thought that we got more than €1 value out of them.

Dinner at home after an exhausting day, potato gratain and Brussels sprouts, with salmon (Hans) and leberkäse (Di)... and some easy listening CD music. Good night from a rainy Berlin (first day since we arrived that the whole day more or less has been like that).

 

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