A Tale of Two Museums

At the risk of becoming wildly unpopular, I have to admit that I kind of hate museums (with a few small exceptions). I've tried to like them. I swear, I have. Almost every person I have admired who is smart, interesting, and well-rounded has put "going to museums" on the list of their likes. I'm not sure if there is anyone out there who wants to love museums as much as I do. But I've coming to terms with the fact that I find them disconnected, sterile, and a bit boring, really.

But in Berlin, visiting museums is almost a non-negotiable. The city has been at the center of two horrifically oppressive times, and for those who live there, and for all of us on the outside, there is a need to make sense of those atrocities. There is need to understand the reason for the loss of so many lives.

So in one day, I visited two museums: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Mauer Museum at Checkpoint Charlie.



The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the first of the two I visited, is less of museum than a experience. To find the entrance, I had to work my way through the Field of Stelae, which is made up of 2711 concrete blocks that were erected to commemorate the Jewish lives lost in the Holocaust. Once inside, the museum ushers you through eight different rooms - revealing eight different ways of making the horrors that were inflicted on the Jews real, tangible and present for the visitor. It starts with a timeline that offers a big picture view of the main events that made up the national socialist terror policy between 1933 and 1945, but then all of the rooms that followed gave meaning to those facts.

I read the personal diaries and letters from victims,unable to know the future, navigating through changing laws, forced migration to the ghettos, rumors of concentration campus. I looked at genealogies of full, healthy families, ripped apart by the Holocaust. I heard the names of murdered and missing Jews from all over Europe. And I listened to the stories of survivors as they recounted each brutality they had to suffer.

It was intimate, and personal, and devastatingly emotional - an absolutely exceptional museum.

And then I went to the second museum...


I believe that the intent of the Mauer Museum was to document the cruelty of the Berlin Wall, memorialize those who died trying to escape East Berlin for West Berlin via Checkpoint Charlie, and highlight the successful attempts made to escape Communism.

In actuality, it was a jumbled, disjointed, incoherent, haphazard collection of stuff from the time period (and other time periods) translated into four different languages. Sure, there were parts that I enjoyed. Mostly, it was learning about escape techniques - the triumph of human ingenuity over oppression: cars with secret hiding spots in the trunk, tunnels that were dug, hot air balloons that went into flight, persons hidden between surf boards.

But finding those stories was like digging through my grandmother's attic, passing over objects unable to speak their memories for the tidbits that somehow already made sense to me.