Museum of Everyday Life in the GDR

About this place

This museum answers a question the Wall and Stasi museums do not: what was ordinary daily life in East Germany actually like? Not high politics or security services, but what people ate, wore, bought and did on holiday. The exhibits come out of people's homes: a Trabant car made of reinforced plastic that took more than ten years on a waiting list to obtain, along with furniture, appliances, clothing, children's toys and tinned food in original packaging. There is also a fully equipped camping tent — because travel was restricted, so camping inside the country became the majority's holiday. The museum falls neither into Ostalgie nostalgia nor into blanket condemnation: it presents the tension between the ordinary life people genuinely lived and the constraints surrounding it. Entry is free, and it sits inside the Kulturbrauerei — a nineteenth-century brewery whose brick buildings were converted into a cultural complex.