The Wall Museum at the East Side Gallery, which opened last year, is situated in the same building as the Pirates Bar. Less well known is the fact that the roof used to be an observation point when the Wall was up.
Wall Museum, East Side Gallery, Berlin,
" data-orig-size="3264,2166" g="" sizes="(max-width: 551px) 100vw, 551px" data-image-title="The Wall Museum Berlin" data-orig-file="https://englishmaninberlin.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/img_20171209_171623.jpg?w=551" data-image-meta="{" />As its name indicates, the museum focuses on the years of the Wall, 1961-1989. It starts with a short video that summarises the events leading up to the building of the Wall, and then leads you chronologically through events until its climactic fall.
The exhibition mainly consists of videos, showing interviews with escapees to watchtower guards and ordinary people whose lives were affected to key players such as spies and politicians. The atmosphere inside the museum is almost oppressive, with no windows and the blaring noise and heat of screens in each room. This may be apt, seeing as the Wall itself was oppressive and the Cold War was a battle of ideologies, often fought out on TV screens.
Nowadays, with a pivot to video taking place on many news sites and media creating and catering to shorter attention spans, there is something disturbing about a museum that relies so heavily on the moving image. I want space to contemplate in exhibitions, more depth, and a variety of different sources to peruse so that I collect and evaluate information independently. Sure, everything is curated, but relying solely on videos feels lazy and fleeting.
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