Volume 2, Day 16
One of the more interesting things about Leipzig is that it appeared to play a critical role in the Peace Movement that helped bring about the downfall of the GDR. Weekly “peace prayers” in the St. Nikolai church as well as the environmental movement were the basis of a civil society that allowed organization outside the control of the Stasi. The annual Leipzig Messe (trade fair) shined an international spotlight on the city that sometimes made it harder to fully crack down on dissent. My goal for the day was to brush up on my history by visiting two museums. As an added bonus, each of them had free admission.
I headed to the Stasi Museum in the morning. The museum and archives are located in an actual Stasi headquarters, which was been preserved with original paint, furnishings, etc. The museum was entirely in German, and I made a slow pass through testing my reading comprehension skills with the aid of a dictionary. Eventually, I decided I should shell out the money for an audio guide because I wasn’t getting the full story. Though it was a bit expensive, I am glad to have gotten the guide. However, it was a little verbose. I got impatient at times as the British narrator droned on for five, six, nine minutes at a single display case. I spend so much time listening to podcasts at 1.5 times speed, I wish I could do the same with these devices. I guess I was also getting hangry.
Regarding the actual history of the Stasi, I suppose it seems quaint to look at all the analog surveillance and record keeping. But, how can we be shocked, disturbed, angered by the total control of a society when our so-called liberal governments are doing the same on a much grander scale. Snowden blew the whistle on NSA, a few tech companies had a public shaming, but that hasn’t slowed down the march of complete government intrusion into every aspect of our personal lives. From surveillance cameras to biometrics to wiretapping, honestly speaking, the citizens of the GDR were probably better off than Americans today. I should be drawing analogies to China, which gets itself in the news regularly for its overt surveillance, but I couldn’t help thinking about the US and its partners in the Five Eyes. Stasi is shorthand for Ministry of State Security. Plug in some synonyms and we are talking about the National Security Agency.
After the museum, I hurried to the Aldi to source a cheap lunch (salad, pretzel, Zwiebelbrot) and returned to the hostel to chow down on it with a couple cups of coffee. I took a quick power nap, and headed once more into the old town to track down the Zeitgeschichtliches Forum (Forum of Contemporary History).
This museum was awesome. It began with the end of World War II and continued all the way to the refugee crisis, but the focus was mainly on life under the GDR. The DDR Museum in Berlin was pretty good and maybe better in a few aspects, but overall it would be worth the trip to Leipzig to see this museum. At this point, I’m familiar with the broad strokes, so each pass through a museum fills in some details and provides extra context to my mental history book. The museum had a lot of archival footage accessible through touchscreen video displays. I watched a lot of them, listening to the German and reading the English subtitles. Much like my visit to the German History Museum, I ran out of time and had to speed up when I hit reunification.
At 5:55, I exited the museum, looked at my watch and hurried over to St. Thomaskirche, which fortunately was only 2 minutes away. This time the doors were wide open and I paid my 2 euros to enter and found a seat. I haven’t mentioned it yet, but timing is impeccable, visiting Leipzig in the midst of its annual Bachfest–a two week celebration of classical music with dozens of concerts across the city. I had checked the online schedule and made note of the relatively cheap cost to listen to some music inside this famous church. Of course, much like the “Opera for Everyone,” I was suckered in by some false advertising. There was barely any Bach on the program. Also, I didn’t know what a “motet” was. The hour long program mostly choral and quite nice to listen to, except for the little sermon that the church snuck in there. I think I got tricked into going to church.
When the program ended, and people slowly, slowly filtered out of the church, I was feeling quite anxious about a number of things. Obviously I wanted to figure out my dinner, but more importantly, I needed some internet time to revise my travel schedule. Originally, I was planning to go to Hannover for a couple days, then head up to Hamburg. However, Hannover does not really have budget accommodation, so I had spent the week reaching out to Couchsurfing hosts. One by one, I had gotten rejected, and here I was on my last night in Leipzig with the final rejection coming through, so I needed a new plan. Skip Hannover? Go somewhere else?
I returned to the hostel, grabbed my shopping bag and hurried over to the Aldi. I grabbed a flat bread, hummus, mozzarella, salami, and some beers. The flatbread was quite thick, so I sliced it in half to make a doubledecker flat bread pizza with the oven in the hostel. While that was baking, I found that I didn’t have a lot of options, but I did discover that Leipzig still had availability in three budget hostels. So, worse case scenario, I could stay another day. That was enough to allow me to relax and enjoy my dinner. I can’t believe I ate the entire thing by myself.
| Audioguide (Stasi Museum) | 5 |
| Lunch (salad + bread) | 2.67 |
| Bachfest | 2 |
| Dinner | 5.5 |
| Total: | 15.17 EUR (118.3 RMB) (USD 17.21) |
Running Total: 6821.1 RMB (USD 992.27)
Daily Average: 426.3 RMB (USD 62.02)