Berlin opens first-ever Cold War museum - DW (English)

For much than 40 years, Berlin was connected the beforehand enactment of the Cold War. Here is wherever GDR dissidents planned their flight to the West, wherever American and Soviet spies plotted and schemed, wherever chancellors, presidents and archetypal secretaries connected some sides of the Iron Curtain performed acts of governmental brinkmanship.

Now, Germany's superior is getting a depository that aims to bring the past of the Cold War to life.

The Cold War Museum, located connected Unter den Linden 14, conscionable a fewer 100 meters from wherever the Berlin Wall erstwhile stood, is the archetypal of its benignant worldwide.

While different institutions screen aspects of the aforesaid past - the Stasi museum successful Leipzig for example, which looks astatine East Germany's notorious concealed constabulary - the extremity of the Cold War Museum is to supply an interactive, and entertaining, overview of this captious play for the mean visitor, with nary erstwhile speechmaking required.

After entering done a symbolic Iron Curtain that covers the beforehand partition of the depository - shot done with holes and bearing the images of Cold War politicians from Harry S. Truman, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin done Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan - visitors tin rotation done an grounds taking a wide changeable attack to history.

Iconic actors and events of the Cold War travel unneurotic successful the museumImage: @Cold War Museum

History revisited done virtual reality 

In sections connected Espionage, the Space Race, the Vietnam War, and Nuclear Disarmament, among others, you tin pat your mode done humanities videos and melodramatic reconstructions of cardinal moments successful the Cold War.

Don a virtual world headset and you're transported backmost decades to a divided Berlin. You tin travel the (recreated) acquisition of East German borderline defender Hans Conrad Schumann as helium defects to West Berlin soon earlier the Berlin Wall is built, by jumping implicit a barbed ligament barricade, a infinitesimal captured successful a world-famous photograph for Life Magazine.

Visitors tin sync their smartphones to astir of the exhibits to perceive archetypal eyewitness reports from the clip oregon acceptable up augmented world displays.

A depository for the younger generation

The high-tech attack comes from Cold War Museum CEO Carsten Kollmeier and CFO Harald Braun, the squad down Berlin's fashionable German Spy Museum, and is designed to entreaty to younger visitors, peculiar ones with nary memories, and fewer associations, with the Cold War.

Virtual world experiences for the adjacent generationImage: @Cold War Museum

"My anticipation is that we tin scope much than the typical, older depository visitant and truly person a cross-generational appeal," Kollmeier says, "the grandson, calved aft the Cold War, attending with his grandfather, who lived done it."

Despite each the flashy tech, determination is inactive plentifulness to entreaty to past geeks and old-school depository heads. Bernd Stöver, prof of planetary past astatine the University of Potsdam and writer of respective books connected the Cold War, headed up the advisory committee that accompanied the design, making definite everything successful the accumulation is informed by the latest humanities research.

From missiles to spacesuits

Among the artifacts connected show is simply a Soviet-era S75 rocket - the ominous rocket hangs implicit the entranceway - of the benignant utilized to sprout down American aviator and CIA spy Garry Powers over the Soviet Union successful 1960, an lawsuit that triggered an planetary incidental (and is depicted successful Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning "Bridge of Spies").

There's 1 of the Telex machines that provided a nonstop nexus betwixt Moscow and Washington during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Cold War-era spacesuits from some NASA astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts.

A sealed jar contains a "scent sample," a cloth soaked with the odor of arrested dissidents that the Stasi utilized to bid dogs to place and way those opposed to the East German regime.

Echoes of today's warfare successful Ukraine

Russia's warfare connected Ukraine, which galore person seen arsenic an enactment reigniting the Cold War, is obscurity to beryllium seen successful the existent grounds - the depository was designed agelong earlier the February 24 penetration - but existent events successful Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol springiness a caller urgency to the past connected show here.

The Iron Curtain astatine the museum's entrance, notes Sergei Tchoban, the Russian-born, Berlin-based designer who designed the Cold War Museum, was created by a Ukrainian graphic artist.

And respective plan elements - from the museum's blood-red floors to a life-sized exemplary of a atomic weaponry that hangs precariously adjacent to the overgarment cheque - evoke the wide and contiguous dangers of the past clip Russia was astatine warfare with the West.

As Tchoban notes: "It's a past that should ne'er beryllium repeated." 

Berlin's Cold War Museum opens to the nationalist connected November 26.

Edited by: Elizabeth Grenier