Wende Museum

I went to the Wende Museum in Culver City which is dedicated to the preservation, acquisition, and allowing access to materials from Eastern European during the Cold War period. The museum’s name comes from the German word for wall. Among the artifacts in the museums possession is a 2.6-ton segment of the Berlin Wall painted by renowned wall artist Thierry Noir that is positioned outside the museum’s entrance.

The museum is fairly small with one main exhibition space on the second floor and an installation on the first floor. I spent the majority of my time in the first floor exhibit that was called “Facing the Wall”. It focuses on the 96-mile wall, which was the ‘frontline of the Cold War’ that prevented East Germans from escaping to West Germany. It examined the Cold War icon from the personal perspective; what it was like to cross it, built it, defend it and deface it. It takes the stories of a day visitor, an East German Stasi officer, a boarder guard and a wall painter.

The first section focused on a day visitor, who grew up in West Berlin and his father was a leader in the communist party. As a boy he visited East Berlin many times, buying items subsidized by the East German government. In his section of the room were things one would experience in boarder crossing; promotional tourist brochures, wax seals, various passports, pavement stones, the gate controller, stamps, a cabinet with official documents, subsidized items and various currencies.

The section titled ‘Behind the Curtain of the Stasi Officer’ displayed items in daily use of a Stasi officer at the wall. The was a briefcase of espionage devices, interrogation equipment, surveillance equipment, a sign with the motto of Stasi officer, an officer uniform and a video of an abandoned Stasi office post wall collapse. This Stasi officer was the man responsible for drawing the line through Berlin for where the wall was to be built.

The final section was titled ‘Protecting the Barrier’ which focused on a commander of East German boarder. He was responsible for securing the border and preventing an attempt of some East German to escape to the West. What I found interesting about this section was the facial recognition system that the major devised. There was a poster that had the blown up flashcards used to train boarder control in order to see who was using a false passport. The majority of them I guessed wrong because the faces looked so similar. There was one example I guessed incorrectly I thought was unfair because it was a side-by-side picture of twins.

Then there was an interactive computer screen with interviews of the four men in the modern day, retelling events from the past. This is where I learned of the wall painter Thierry Noir who grew up 5 meters from the wall. One day he was just overcome to paint it and later was asked if he was paid by the government to do it, which he was not. He said that it was not possible to make something beautiful that was meant to kill. His feeling of the painting of the wall was a symbol of liberty. In more recent history, photographs of his painted sections of the wall were used in advertising as a symbol of freedom.

This exhibit emphasized the complex and interconnected contradictory nature of everyday history. It was not just one event but years of time that affected many individuals. It showed that the wall as a place of employment and a place to be feared. It depicted the duality of history as the actual event and the personal experiences of the people that lived through it. The wall was a place where the realities of political ideology and personal experience came face to face. I believe this exhibit was relevant to our class in the personal nature of its telling of history and acknowledgement of the past with the unique perspective.