Wall Museum

This article covers the museum at Checkpoint Charlie. See also: The Wall Museum Berlin at the Oberbaumbrücke.

House at Checkpoint Charlie

Museum exit

The Freedom Memorial

The Mauermuseum - Museum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie is a private museum that focuses on the Berlin Wall . The museum founded by Rainer Hildebrandt opened on October 19, 1962. In 1963 it moved to Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrichstrasse in the Berlin district of Kreuzberg under the sponsorship of the August 13th Working Group . The director of the museum is Alexandra Hildebrandt .

description

The Wall Museum wants to illustrate the border system and the "assistance of the protecting powers". In addition to photos and documentation of successful escape attempts, the means of escape are also shown: hot air balloons , escape cars, chairlifts and a mini submarine.

In its early days, according to Sybille Frank, the Wall Museum was as famous as it was notorious for its "chaotic hodgepodge of everyday objects, relics of all kinds, escape objects 'to touch' and artistic works of controversial quality." The fall of the Berlin Wall and the associated significant decline in public subsidies were converted into a private company and the “former political center reinvented as a place of experience”.

With around 850,000 visitors annually, it was one of the six most visited museums in Berlin in 2012.

The museum is housed in the building at Checkpoint Charlie by the architect Peter Eisenman .

research

The working group on August 13 , 2017 , gave the number of people killed at the Wall and the inner-German border up to 1989 as 1899. This also includes victims who fled across the Baltic Sea , German fatalities at borders outside Germany, GDR soldiers killed and Soviet deserters , suicides by members of the border troops , as well as people kidnapped and killed by the Stasi and KGB after successfully escaping.

literature

• Annette Kaminsky: Places of Remembrance. Memorial signs, memorials and museums on the dictatorship in the Soviet occupation zone and GDR. On behalf of the Foundation to Process the SED Dictatorship and the Federal Agency for Civic Education . 3rd, revised and expanded edition. Links Verlag, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-86153-862-2 , pp. 54–56.

Web links

Commons : Wall Museum  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Official website of the Wall Museum - Museum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie .
• Wall Museum - Museum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie . In: Museum Portal Berlin.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ www.mauermuseum.de , page of the museum.
2. ↑ Sybille Frank: To commemorate the wall as a race: The formation of a heritage industry at Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie . 2009, p. 224 f.
3. ↑ Sybille Frank: To commemorate the wall as a race: The formation of a heritage industry at Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie. 2009, p. 225.
4. ↑ Top 10: Number of visits to Berlin's museums and memorials also increased in 2012. Press release of the Senate Department for Culture from December 19, 2013. In: www.berlin.de. Retrieved June 11, 2020 . 
5. ↑ Wall Museum gives an insight into unpublished Stasi files: 58 other victims of the GDR border regime , www.bild.de, 10 August 2017.

Coordinates: 52 ° 30 ′ 28 ″  N , 13 ° 23 ′ 26 ″  E