DDR-Museum, Berlin

The DDR Museum is a hands-on museum about everyday life in East Germany, housed in the DomAquarée in Berlin’s Mitte. Its displays invite you to open cupboards, handle objects and enter reconstructed rooms rather than simply view cases. A scale model of a prefabricated housing estate introduces themes such as work, education, shopping, sport and holidays.

The exhibition also includes a Trabant driving simulation, a cinema, a nursery and spaces presenting the workings of the state and the Stasi, including an interrogation room and a detention cell. The most immersive feature is a recreated WBS 70 apartment with a living room, bedroom, children’s room, bathroom and kitchen. You can compare television programmes, try virtual East German clothing with a digital mirror, write on an Erika typewriter and explore original items in drawers and cupboards.

The museum opened on 15 July 2006 after Peter Kenzelmann created the project. Its collection contains about 360,000 different objects. A separate motorcycle exhibition, added in 2021, presents more than 130 motorcycles made in the DDR across about 800 square metres. The result is a museum you explore through touch, simulation and domestic detail, bringing political power and private routines into the same rooms.