Chloe Paver writes:
Several of the texts in this German History Museums guide discuss the relationship between grass-roots, amateur initiatives to remember the past and official, professional institutions with the same aim. The ‘Museum in der Runden Ecke’ exemplifies the inter-relationship between the two.
Though established and run by amateurs, the museum shares its building with the local branch of the BStU, the government office that administers the Stasi files. Originally, BStU seems to have stood for the government official who runs the operation: the ‘Bundesbeauftragte(r) für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik’ or ‘Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic’. This indigestible title (which has to change its grammatical ending each time the Commissioner changes from a man to a woman or vice versa) has sensibly been reduced to four initials and these have come to stand also for the Commissioner’s office. The German pronunciation is bay-ess-tay-oo.
The BStU is the primary access point for those wanting to read any files that the Stasi kept on them. It also has a mission to educate about the corrupt GDR regime. Amongst other things, this means that it has a smaller but more professional exhibition in its office in the ‘Runde Ecke’ building, so that tourists can, if they wish, read two versions of the same story in two different exhibitions.
If the exhibition of the ‘Museum in der Runden Ecke’ now looks rather old-fashioned, this is partly because it is (it seems to have been produced in the mid-1990s) and partly because even when it was made it imitated an aesthetic of protest from the decade before. The protesters who took part in the Peaceful Revolution declared their anti-government sentiments by means of amateur, improvised visual props: banners, leaflets, clothing, and badges. This was partly a case of making a virtue out of a necessity: the GDR government controlled paper sales and Xeroxing, and opposition groups were banned. Doubtless, it was also a consequence of the sheer pace and spontaneity of the movement, which did not allow for organised marketing. And, finally, it was itself a protest against the over-slick propaganda spectaculars of the SED regime. Every meaninglessly upbeat communist slogan on an expensively produced banner found its counterpart in a home-made witticism painted by hand on an old bedsheet. A recent temporary exhibition at the museum used some of these as display props (newly painted on new bedsheets): ‘Die Katze läßt das Mausen nicht // Alle Bonzen vor Gericht’ (‘A cat will never give up mousing / So put the bigwigs in the dock’). On display was also a music fan’s jacket, this one authentic, on the back of which was scrawled, in felt-tip pen: ‘Wo man singt, laß dich nieder // Nur böse Menschen dulden keine Lieder’ (‘Sit yourself down where there’s singing // Only wicked people don’t tolerate songs’).
Given the potency of this graffiti spirit in driving historic change in 1989-90, it makes sense that the museum should have invited its designers to evoke it in the displays. The first thing the visitor sees is a banner hanging in the stairwell, announcing that the building has been secured on behalf of the government and the Bürgerkomitee (Citizens’ Committee), the citizens rights organisation formed during the revolution. It is unclear whether this is the original banner, but it establishes an equation between protest and improvised media. In the main exhibition space, the heading for each exhibition board is written in marker pen on a rectangle of corrugated cardboard, which has been cut out rather unevenly, as if by hand. This is if course a very stylised allusion to a 1980s protest aesthetic, rather than a reproduction of it, given that protesters generally wrote on the smooth side of cardboard, not on the impractical corrugated side, and given that few protesters aimed for perfectly even, schoolteacherly handwriting.
Now that many protest campaigns take place via social media, and now that slick visuals are available to any protester with access to technology, the Museum in der Runden Ecke is a good object-lesson in democratic media studies, and it will be a shame when it gets its inevitable makeover. At the same time, it falls so far below today’s expected standard of visual presentation that it may well begin to put visitors off. The yellow typed information sheets that have been glued to the boards are not part of the samizdat aesthetic, only evidence of an earlier way of making exhibitions, before whole boards could be digitally printed. Moreover, like many amateur exhibitions, the museum suffers from the gradual accretion of material: interesting information about the fate of ex-Stasi officials since 2000 is difficult to follow because time phrases such as ‘recently’ and ‘today’ are used for events that evidently unfolded over a period of time, now some time in the past. In professional museums, the practice of changing displays only once every decade (and then doing it very thoroughly) makes history exhibitions somewhat inflexible, but also gives them a tone of authoritative certainty.
German History Museums 