Exhibition: DDR Museum in Berlin before reopening after water damage

A good three months after the huge aquarium in a Berlin hotel burst, the DDR Museum, which was also affected, can reopen its doors.

Exhibition: DDR Museum in Berlin before reopening after water damage

A good three months after the huge aquarium in a Berlin hotel burst, the DDR Museum, which was also affected, can reopen its doors. After extensive renovation, the museum in the center of Berlin, which is popular with tourists and school classes, is ready for visitors this Saturday.

The private museum belongs to the same building complex in which the large aquarium was located. During the accident in mid-December, the 16-meter-high aquarium in the hotel lobby burst, and around a million liters of water spilled into the building and onto the street. Two people were injured and almost all of the 1,500 fish died. Some of the aggressive salt water had also penetrated into the museum and had caused damage of around 1.5 million euros there alone.

The DDR Museum is now opening with a new concept. According to Freitag, creative director Matthias Kaminsky was able to use modules that had already been considered and were implemented at short notice. With "DDR compact", "German division" and "Propaganda" three new areas are the focus, around which the "GDR worlds" are grouped with reconstructions of exemplary furnishings for apartments with kitchens or children's rooms, but also listening rooms or kindergartens.

The exhibition now also includes a six meter wide section made from segments of the Berlin Wall, which divided the city until 1990. For the presentation, those responsible can draw on around 300,000 objects from the GDR era in their depot, around 8,000 of which can be seen in the exhibition. The largest part comes from private donors who make their objects available to the museum.

The museum, which opened in 2006, was visited by around 585,000 people in 2019, the last year before the corona pandemic. Last year it was again around 500,000.

DDR-Museum

NEXT NEWS