A Time Tunnel Back to Dark Days in Germany

LEIPZIG, Germany — Lest anyone forget the dire reality of dictatorship amid the nostalgia eastern Germans feel for their vanished state, the Forum of Contemporary History opening today in this cradle of 1989’s anti-Communist revolution offers sobering reminders.

From photographs of hungry children racing for food drops during the 1948-49 Soviet blockade of Berlin to images documenting some of the killings of East Germans trying to escape across the Berlin Wall, the collection presents a thorough indictment of the erstwhile German Democratic Republic.

“There is so much discussion these days about how it wasn’t all bad in the GDR, that there were accomplishments as well as failures, which is true. But too much of that kind of reflection risks overlooking the massive injustices of that system,” said Paul Bocklet, a Roman Catholic Church official and head of the museum’s public advisory committee.

The museum is arranged in a 21,000-square-foot time tunnel, beginning with the 1945 Potsdam Conference that divided vanquished Germany into Allied occupation zones and culminating with the joyous Oct. 3, 1990, reunification of the two German states.

Visitors following the chronological development of the country known as East Germany are bombarded at each exhibit with evidence of how state control shackled creativity and crushed the spirit.

A clunky Barkas paddy wagon used by secret police to round up dissidents stands in the open space of one room, shamed as much by unspoken comparison with western Germany’s powerful automotive products as by its role in political repression.

Crude, soot-stained machines that would look more at home in pictures from the 19th century testify to the industrial backwardness of the centrally planned state. Mock-ups of offices, homes and shop windows re-create the drab environment that surrounded every step of life, from inferior televisions and radios to boxes of laundry soap devoid of self-promotion and color.

“This forum is intended for confronting the history of the last 50 or 60 years, not simply a place for its presentation,” said director Rainer Eckert, noting that the five-story structure in the heart of the city is equipped with conference facilities for debates about the GDR’s legacy.

Eckert, a native easterner, made clear that there had been differences among the forum’s designers about the context in which the 2,500 objects of the permanent exhibit should be displayed.

“We have mutual regrets and mutual responsibility for that time,” Hermann Schaefer, head of the national historical foundation, said in explaining the western influence on the presentation.

How much interest eastern Germans have in reacquainting themselves with their old identity will be evident only after Sunday, the first day the museum will be open to the public.

Today’s ceremonial opening by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is an invitation-only affair timed to mark the 10th anniversary of the first major grass-roots demonstration against the Communist Party’s ironfisted control. The Leipzig protest triggered a wave of popular demands for democracy that a month later forced the leadership to open the Berlin Wall.

The forum, in which a modest $17 million in federal funds has been invested, has stirred some local controversy for unapologetically branding the post-World War II era a time of dictatorship.

“It might not represent the opinion of the people who are still very attached to the former GDR, but I think it turned out well,” said Armin Goertz, a journalist for the local Leipziger Volkszeitung.

But more concern has been expressed by Leipzig’s plethora of smaller historical museums that the big national project will consume resources and patronage that might otherwise come to them.

While the displays are dominated by artifacts of shabbiness and examples of systematic mistreatment, there are also images of discontent with the post-reunification picture.

In a display that might be called “then and now,” photographs taken in 1987 show a retired Communist Party official, two teenage sisters and a young family in their respective homes. The commentary with another set of pictures taken 10 years later attests to the uneven fate of easterners in the new era.

“To provide work, social justice and humanity--that was the goal of our fight, now as well as then,” says the retiree, 83-year-old Hermann Goeck, who has come to terms with the party’s place in history.

“We’ve found ourselves,” Beate and Eva-Maria Bachmann, now both power-suited businesswomen of 28 and 29, say of their lives in a reunited Germany, presenting a sharp contrast with the punky hostility evident in their teenage picture.

“We’ve had no happiness. We’ve been betrayed by everyone,” said Harald Wandel, father of the young family in the third photos. “I just haven’t made it in this country.”