Time for another Wednesday excursion. Today, we went to the DDR (GDR) Museum. This museum is focused on not so much the politics of the DDR, but rather the way that the citizens lived their everyday lives. Great part about this museum is that a lot of the stuff is interactive. Some stuff is obviously in glass cases and whatnot, but there's some things that you get to touch and whatnot.
Not so much to say... I'm assuming you guys don't really reallly want to know all that history junk.
Some highlights:
In preschool/kindergarten, the children couldn't go to the bathroom when they wanted. Instead, there was a group time when everybody went to the potty. Really saved the teachers a lot of trouble, and taught the kids how to be good citizens, working I guess, as a collective.
There were these limos that high ranking officials would get driven to work in every day, and there was only so much they could see out the window, without craning their heads. People below in the hierarchy had actually organized it so that the higher up officials thought that everything was going peachy in their communist world. (We do the same thing nowadays with the president, and they did the same thing back when there were lords and dukes and duchesses and whatnot who wanted to see their villages. They only show their leaders what's good) There was a preset route that they were driven along every day, and they could see shop windows and all that. Everything visible along this path was beautiful, flowers, paint, etc, and always food in the windows. They worked really hard to keep that part looking prosperous. But the paint literally stopped at the height of the highest thing one could see from the window. In this way, they managed to trick these officials into thinking that everything down below was running well. Crazy, right?
Trabis- these cute little plastic cars that were pretty much useless. Unfortunately, they were the cars available in the time, and so everybody wanted one. However, due to poor planning (planned economy whoo) and lack of materials, it was a 12 or so year wait to get one of them. Parents would put in a petition for one when their child was born in the hopes that when they were old enough to drive, they could have a car.
The interesting thing is that it was fairly successful. There were plenty of jobs, no hunger, and people were able to live regular lives. We always tend to depict the DDR as this Orwellian 1984 nightmare for humanity and open thought. I mean, there were wiretaps and people turning in their relatives, and a basic lack of political rights, but to some degree it worked.
The DDR car that took about 12 years to get.Now, since they stopped making them, and there were so few to begin with, it's THE collector's car.
I'm not entirely sure why this was in the museum, but it's a skating trophy from 1960.
The food they ate.
Here's me looking sweaty in DDR army dress-up clothes.I'm assuming someone was telling some sort of situation-inappropriate joke
Then I was so pooped that I went straight home and took a nap.
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