ABSTRACT
This essay examines three museums interpreting the material culture of Cold War espionage in Berlin, a city synonymous with spies in fact and fiction: the Allied Museum, the Stasi Museum and the German Spy Museum. The Allied Museum displays an internationally significant artefact of western intelligence in a section of the secret tunnel built by the CIA and MI6 to tap Soviet military telephone lines in East Berlin. By contrast, the Stasi Museum in the organisation’s former headquarters in East Berlin exhibits original objects and interiors, reputedly as they were left in 1990. On the site of the Berlin Wall’s “death strip” at Leipziger Platz, the German Spy Museum contains the material culture of both sides, but also features former spies talking openly about their experiences. Each case study will consider the museological issues of authenticity and multiperspectivity when representing spies as controversial figures in Cold War history.
