Double Museum Day

Marking where the
Berlin Wall once stood

It is simple to spend an entire day indoors, walking at a ridiculously slow pace, reading plaques and looking at artifacts.  Our second day in Berlin was spent like this, wandering first through the German History Museum and then through the Checkpoint Charlie Museum.

The history museum had an amazingly large collection; knowing that I would never get through the whole museum in the three or four hours we allotted, I went backwards in time.  I only made it through the 20th century and still had to skip and skim parts of the exhibit!  It was very interesting to see how the German museum explained and portrayed the events and artifacts from World War II, since I had only ever been exposed to history books and museums from the United States' perspective.  In my opinion, it was a very honest look at their history and an acceptance of the past.

Checkpoint Charlie was a completely different type of museum.  Where the history museum (and pretty much every other museum I've ever been to) was well structured, laid out in logical order, easy to read (as long as it was in English), and well maintained, the Checkpoint Charlie museum was pretty much the opposite.  A private museum, it was disorganized, cluttered, redundant in some places, and thrown together in a few old apartments near the actual border crossing.  However it was also one of the coolest museums I've ever been to.

I should mention that the museum focuses on the successful escapes of people across the Berlin Wall from East Germany.  The posters read like stories, only made more effective with the photos and apparatus that surrounded them.  Seeing two suitcases with the sides cut out and a mannequin folded into the available space to make it across the boarder on a train... looking at two surfboards on top of a car with the middles cut out, a mannequin lying inside... getting to search a car for the hidden passenger, only to find the mannequin under the seat's fabric instead of foam filling... it was amazing to realize that these people were trying to escape a wall that was only torn down in 1989.

The actual checkpoint was just outside the museum.  There were "guards" there (for photo opportunities) standing in front of the guard hut and nearby was the large sign warning people about crossing the boarder and leaving the American or sector.