Week 4 in Berlin, about things that can't be shown in pictures
On Tuesday, we went to the DDR Museum, which is, so far, my favorite museum from the whole trip. The program is almost ending, so I feel like this says a lot. The DDR Museum shows what daily life was like in East Germany after World War II and before the Berlin Wall came down. I found it fascinating because it did not only talk about politics in a very distant way. Instead, it showed the small details of people’s everyday lives: what they wore, what their homes looked like, what they watched, and what they were allowed or not allowed to read.
One of the most interesting parts to me was how banned books were hidden behind a little curtain. It was such a simple display, but it made me think about how knowledge and imagination could become something dangerous under a controlling government. I was also surprised to learn that Disney comics were hunted down because they were seen as promoting capitalism.
On Thursday, we went to the Schwules Museum, which is dedicated to LGBTQ+ history and culture. There, I was introduced to the writer Susan Sontag. One board about her ideas really struck me. It explained that she wanted to be seen as a writer, not just as a female writer, and that she wanted her work to be judged by its quality rather than by her gender identity.
This week we also got a little tour around some neighborhoods in East Berlin. There we saw some funny paintings on the wall.
Over the weekend, my friends and I went to the Stasi Museum for our final project. The Stasi was the secret police agency that monitored the lives of East Germans when East Germany was ruled by the Socialist Unity Party. Basically, Stasi employees spied on people they thought were “suspicious” or potentially dangerous to the party. They had frighteningly detailed ways of watching people, including using “unofficial collaborators” who blended into society and gathered “useful” information from ordinary citizens.
What shocked me was not only the scale of the surveillance, but also how ordinary some of it looked. Among the tens of thousands of documents and photographs they produced, historians today still cannot always figure out the intentions behind certain photos. That uncertainty stayed with me. A picture may show a street, a building, or a person walking by, but behind it there might have been suspicion, control, and fear.
Looking back, this week was less about seeing beautiful places and more about understanding invisible things: censorship, identity, surveillance, and memory. These are not always easy to photograph, but they are probably the things I will remember most from Berlin.
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