The Wall Museum East Side Gallery

The Wall Museum East Side Gallery: Exhibition in the old mill granary

The Wall Museum East Side Gallery is located at Mühlenstraße 78-80 in Friedrichshain, at the southern end of the East Side Gallery and directly at the Oberbaum Bridge. It is housed in the former mill granary, a warehouse that stood in the death strip during GDR times. Warschauer Straße station is reachable in a few minutes, and Schlesisches Tor is about four hundred meters away. The path to it already leads along the city’s longest preserved section of the wall.

The museum opened in March 2016, having been announced for the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the opening was performed by Klaus Meine, the singer of the Scorpions. It is operated by the Museums- und Ausstellungs GmbH for German and European History. The exhibition spans from 1945 to 1990 and tells the story of the division not through dates and treaties, but through the people who endured it. The fact that a warehouse became a museum is due to the fact that nothing had to be rebuilt here: the ground on which the exhibition stands was itself part of the border installations.

13 rooms, over 100 screens and voices of contemporary witnesses

The permanent exhibition is spread over thirteen staged rooms, featuring over a hundred screens, projectors, and tablets. Among them are original wall segments, a concrete mixer, and barbed wire from the border installations. News material from the sixties is deliberately shown side-by-side from Eastern and Western perspectives, which unpleasantly highlights the propagandistic slant of both sides. A balcony facing the Spree river commemorates the children who drowned in the border waters.

The core consists of the film interviews. People who had to vacate their homes within hours after August 13, 1961, former border soldiers, and representatives of the civil rights movement of 1989, as well as Mikhail Gorbachev, speak out. A snapshot from 1988 shows a young Leonardo DiCaprio with his German grandmother at the Wall. The Wall Museum East Side Gallery also offers twenty-one thematic guided tours, from the history of the Wall to school and indoctrination in the GDR. Those who step out of the building afterwards stand directly in front of the East Side Gallery and see the painted concrete wall with different eyes, as the biographies from inside the house still resonate.