The year is 1961; Construction of the Berlin wall,
one of the most spectacular turning points in the exhibition
with the so-called tank confrontation
in October 1961, where American Soviet tanks
faced each other at Checkpoint Charlie.
Chancellor Adenauer already feared
the outbreak of nuclear war in the event of another confrontation.
How did contemporaries prepare for this feared outbreak?
The government had a bunker
built in a former railroad tunnel,
20 kilometers south of Bonn.
This is furniture from the so-called presidential suite,
a sofa and a stand lamp.
This bunker was built to provide refuge more than 1000 people
who would have administered the country
in a nuclear emergency.
But there were also other things
in order to prepare the population for nuclear war,
the Federal Ministry of Food prepared
an action called “Aktion Eichhörnchen”,
where they prepared the population
to accumulate emergency supplies.
There were also educational films about
building private bunkers or
even a preparation to issue brochures
and in these brochures was then exactly specified
for how long a stockpile had to be created
to survive two weeks in the greatly feared nuclear war.
The fear of nuclear war was
in the Federal Republic of Germany and also in the GDR
one of the determining things in the daily politics
and the respective governments tried to
prepare the population for it.