This reminds me of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg.

Not the museum itself, which is a harrowing, humbling and human reminder of the atrocities South Africa endured (including our own Stasi-like Special Branch police force who spied on people, tortured activists with the wet bag technique among others, and killed people in custody by throwing them out of fifth storey windows, later attributing the deaths to off-hand explanations of "oh he slipped on the soap") - but the museum's inappropriate proximity to a major theme park / casino complex.

It's a tad unnerving, standing in the gallows room, where nooses have been hung for every person executed under the death penalty only to hear screaming. Even more so when you realise the screams are not some tacky sideshow sound effect tacked on to the exhibit, but coming from delighted punters on the rollercoaster just outside.

For those who didn't know, there's a very specific term for this: Ostalgie.

#1, PopTart- that's quite astounding. Did you think it cheapened the exhibit, or made it more poignant by comparison with the Johannesburg of today?

Cool in a way.

The sign says:

"You [should] come to us - otherwise we'll come to you!"

@2 Beanolini - well it's certainly indicative of how most people have moved on completely, especially in the bright consumer glitz that is Joburg.

It's great that we're able to ride the shiny coaster of growth and democracy and opportunity (not to gloss over the serious dips that might unrail us completely from dodgy corrupt politicians to crime and AIDS - where bacteriophages might come in handy) but it's too easy to forget where we've been, what we've come through.

My 22 year old adopted black brother, for eg, refused to vote in the last election - even though people died so he could - because he felt it didn't have anything to do with him.

The translation, while correct in wording, should probably be more like "Come join us -- otherwise we'll come to you.".

It would reflect the important "open" STASI approach to spying on your neighbour, teacher, husband, wife, kids, parents...whoever. Everybody was more than welcome to join the fun and become an "inoffizieller Mitarbeiter"...outsourcing socialist-style.

In other news, people fetishize institutions that specialize in control or domination as part of their BDSM lovemap; see also Nazi uniforms intersecting with the leather scene. No film at 11 (although there are probably plenty on the web already).

First I've heard of this... *chuckle* Ostalgie strikes again! Nice to see that we can laugh about it now. (No sarcasm. I'm honestly pleased.)

PS This makes me wonder how many Ossis read BoingBoing. Here's one! Who else?

"Come to us - otherwise we come to you!"

lol!

laughing at horror is one way to defeat it. A Stasi bar aimed at glorifying that past would be another thing. Humans cannot stand carry all the guilt and shame collectively attached to the species.

It seems that it is an easy thing to attack on the basis of accusations of "trivializing" and "marginalizing" such times and events. For now anyway, memories are too fresh, wounds still open.
What is a decent interval anyway? Should the Armenian massacre subordinate to the Holocaust since it is farther in the past? What is the statute of limitations on atrocity? "Never forget". How remembered are Mao's and Stalin's mass murders? I think most you ask could not even put a rough number of millions to each. How many did the Mongols kill?

The Stasi did have a huge network of informers even by Eastern Bloc standards - perhaps one in ten or even one in five East Germans, if I recall correctly.

There's an old joke based on the belief (true?) that many Stasi employees became taxi drivers after unification. "All you have to do is tell the driver your name - he'll know where you live."

(Jeez, I originally wrote "Eastern Blog" above.)

Takuan: They're not glorifying the Stasi.

I've gone and read some interviews with the owners. And some commentary. Looks like we're not laughing. The owners claim it's "serious satire" and a way to deal with the past. The Stasi victims are, understandably, outraged.

I was 14 when the wall came down. Am I allowed to forget and move on? Are my parents? Do my little nephews need to know when they grow up? "Never forget"?

Maybe my earlier comment wasn't thought out properly. We shouldn't "laugh about it now", but I'm fairly sure we should move on. And I think most of us have.

can we agree then, that any victim of the Stasi has the right to laugh at it?

Absolutely.

I've always wondered why all the tacky witch/Halloween theming in Salem, MA isn't just as bad as the idea of, say, a Six Flags over Auschwitz park.

I guess I won't have to wonder too much longer.

"not at all offensive to the victims of the reign of terror perpetrated by the secret police."

Because the owners are making money using the past crimes of humanity as a base? Prepare to wipe out a lot of other stuff then.

When you buy a dvd or comic of hellboy you're supporting an creative person who took the nazis, used them in a story, and he's living comfortably on his (amazing) work.

The tick i believe exploited joseph stalin for a good laugh.

Monty Python?

Is the brick and mortar nature of this establishment the key of what makes it offensive?

The pirates of the Caribbean ride is in rather bad taste i suppose.

Nice Ostalgie, but San Francisco's had the Walzwerk for years.

Of course, if it was a real Communist immersion experience, one would enter the place and find 80-90% of the tables "reserved" and you'd wait a long while for lousy service, and you'd best ask the waiter what the "special of the day" is (e.g. the only thing they could acquire through illegal trade) - and enjoy your sparse meal of pickles or cabbage, a few potatoes, a sausage, and beer.

I think the difference between something like the stasi, the holocaust, and other such horrors and the Armenian genocide is how they are handled. After World War II, the Germans faced what they had done, and they did it again in east Germany after the collapse. As a result, these things pass and move on. France and England doesn't hold a grudge about fighting the Germans because the Germans fessed up, everyone hugged, and it was over.

Now, you take Japan as the counter point. Japan still has issues with "fessing up". They made amends with the Americans by renouncing militarism with such forceful devotion, but they utterly failed in making amends and apologizing to the rest of Asia. As a result, the rest of Asia that had contact with the Japanese to this day still have a lot of bubbling anger over WW2.

The same goes with the Armenian genocide. Turkey never faced up to what happened, and as a result, many generations later, there is still anger and a lack of resolution to the affair. You can even see some of this in the American's way of dealing with civil rights.

Time will probably heal all wounds in the end, but I think the Germans have shown with crystal clarity that the quicker you come to terms with the horrors that might have been committed, the faster people move on and forgive. How Germany is viewed in Europe could not be any more different than how Japan is viewed in Asia.

"utterly failed in making amends and apologizing to the rest of Asia."

not so. Many apologies at various levels from top to bottom have been made, compensation has been paid, cooperation about cleaning up chemical weapons has been forthcoming - it is completely untrue to say that Japan has done nothing to make amends. There are two basic problems: Firstly, some things can never be made right. Secondly, China and Korea especially have used this issue for domestic political hay-making.

Anyone gets tired of apologizing if they see no real acceptance from the other side. Another matter is that this is all sixty years ago. At what point do descendants hold liability for their grandfather's actions?

#18: It is far more than that. Japanese apologies have been half hearted and then back with denials. The difference between how Germany dealt with holocaust and how Japanese dealt with rape of Asia is night and day. Germany has countless monuments and museums dedicated to the atrocities that were committed. They don't deny that the holocaust happened. They are taught in schools what happened without any sugar coating. Japan on the other hand has taken the opposite approach. You are not going to find a rape of Nanking memorial in Japan. You are not going to find anything dealing with the horrible atrocities and mass rape committed on well, pretty much all the islands that were occupied.

Look, I don't disagree. What is done is done. Thw vast majority of Japanese were not even alive during World War II. That doesn't change that glossing over the history has its consequences. Again, Germany is the counter example. This is a nation that pretty boldly stood up for what had happened, acknowledge what had happened fully and without condition, and moved on. The French are not still pissed at the Germans. Israel doesn't hold any animosity towards the German state.

Hell, where Japan did make amends, they have a perfect relationship. The US after WWII basically gave Japan a blank check and whatever trade terms they wanted simply because Japan looked repented in all the ways that the US cared about (namely in terms of militarism).

Where do we go from here? I don't have an answer. You can point to multiple points in history where repentance was either never give or slow, and the result have been almost universally negative. Israel failed to prop up and reshape Palestine after taking them, and now those two people are locked in a death embrace. Japan failed to repent in the way that Germany did to the Asian nations that it occupied, and to this day they are reviled in much of Asia. Hell, the Americans were slow to repent for what they did to blacks in the US, and to this day there is more than a little resentment still floating around.

The opportunity is gone. What to do next? Eh, I'll leave that to people smarter than me.