It has its flaws, but is quite interesting! (Museum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie)

Member Name: Penguin_Cube

Product:	Museum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie
Date:	01/11/09 (34 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Interesting museum, text in four languages

Disadvantages: Too much text, cramped, poorly laid out,

Whilst in Berlin I thought I should at least have a look at the iconic site of where the United States Checkpoint Charlie was located.

For a full account of the history please have a glance the Wikipedia page, this is meant to contain insightful consumer opinion and experiences, and I would like to keep it that way.

On the actual road is a mock-up of a 1960s incarnation of the checkpoint and outside is a man dressed in a US Army uniform holding an American Flag and a man in a Russian Uniform holding a Russia Flag, and for a small fee you can have your photo taken with them (from what I can remember it's 1 Euro). Along Friedrichstraße lies the Museum itself; there is a gift shop entrance and a main entrance so make sure you enter the correct one.

As you enter the correct door you will see a small desk in which you can buy your tickets to enter the museum. From what I can remember it costs £12.50 for adults and £7.50 for children. While purchasing the ticket I was told that backpacks were not allowed inside the exhibits and that there were lockers downstairs. There is a short flight of stairs leading to a basement filled with lockers (which require a 2 Euro coin) and toilets. Although backpacks are 'verboten', from what I could see inside the exhibits, handbags are fine. When you climb back up the stairs you go through a turnstile in which you gain access by putting your ticket in until it beeps, then withdrawing it.

The exhibitions themselves are in rather cramped rooms with no real direction. There are lots of pictures, documents, models, pieces of art, videos and historical objects all accompanied by large boards of text in German, English, French and Russian.

NOTE: There are also Audio Guides., although I do not know the price, quality or what languages they are in as I believed I wouldn't need one.

The museum contains everything you could possibly want to know about Checkpoint Charlie, and probably more. The most fascinating being the attempts of different people to make the escape to freedom into West Berlin by any means possible: From modifying cars and building hot air balloons to digging underground tunnels and hiding in two hollowed out surfboards. The museum contains some of the cars used (or similar ones) in which they have placed a dummy in to show the cramped conditions people would suffer through for their freedom. In this museum you really get a sense of the struggle and the desperation of the people to escape.

What is particularly moving is a piece about how the riverbanks belonged to the west and the actual waters to the east, which lead to large amount of children drowning. The soldiers on the east were not permitted to rescue them due to the fear that they might desert. Another being that twice did truckers try to ram through the defences and through the wall... One managed it and said that bullets whizzed all around him, not hitting him. The other was shot once. Fatally.

The museum from what I could work out is loosely divided into different exhibits although most of them blur into one. One exhibit that was slightly different from the others was one about the 'worldwide non violent struggle for human rights', in which there is large bust of Gandhi.

On the third floor there is a large wedge shaped room in which the walls facing outwards were glass, this allows you to compare the street and checkpoint to the pictures on the floor. Also in this room is a glass box set in the floor containing pieces of the white borderline that have been pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle. It had to be pieced together because it was rescued from a skip and sold to the owner of the Museum (who sadly passed away in 2004) for DM 20,000,000. It is set in the floor and is placed where the line would've been so you can easy walk across it, in contrast to the struggle that the museum shows. Here is also the old sign proclaiming that 'YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR', or something to that effect.

If you manage to find the end of the exhibits then there is a gift shop containing all sorts of souvenirs. Although to retrieve your bag (if you left one in the lockers) you have to leave the gift shop and enter via the main entrance.

One thing about this museum is that there is A LOT of reading, at first you are lured into thinking the museum will be very small and you try you read every piece of text, if you continued with that throughout the whole museum you'd be there for a long time, it is a quite a small museum but there is a lot to see in each room as you wind through, frankly not very well organized, apartments.

Summary: A genuinely interesting museum with lots material, but with too much information packed into it