I got interested in German social history because I‘m a massive fan of the band Kraftwerk. Their whole metier was postwar Germany rewriting the script: a generation trying to reclaim some of its national characteristics. The Museum der Dinge is a great place to contemplate this history. It’s literally the Museum of Things and offers a walk through the consumer aspirations of the 20th century.
It is charmingly unprofessional, so unlike the V&A. Here you have mundane everyday objects but presented in contexts that make you think about them differently. You can wander through and choose a thread to follow: yellow things, say, or things from a certain period, or that perform a certain function.
There’s a constant juxtaposition of the dowdiness of DDR products and the technological goods produced in the west. One art deco television would take up a whole room. It looks like a space rocket. The shop is really nice as well. I bought a poster print of the whole of Das Kapital by Karl Marx in tiny, tiny German text.
• museumderdinge.org
