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I feel a bit like that today, having been to the Holocaust Memorial just south of the Brandenburg Gate and then two exhibitions about the GDR: the Stasi exhibition on Französischerstrasse and the DDR-Museum on the banks of the Spree.  I wasn't hugely impressed by the Holocaust Memorial, I have to say. Of course it's impossible to say how on earth you can memorialise the murder of millions, and a load of stark blocks of stone are as good as anything I suppose, but it doesn't really make you think. I wish the lines of sight had been obscured - you never really get lost in this thing even when you get to its lowest point. To be fair, I didn't go to the exhibition which may be more impressive.

The Stasi exhibition is worthy, not long on fun or gadgets to play with, and not all that friendly to non-German speakers either, but it's free and gives a pretty detailed history of the Staatssicherheitsdienst and guide to its techniques - there are even some of the jars on show containing dusters impregnated with suspects' smells, gathered from chairs so that sniffer dogs or Geruchsdifferenzierungshunde as the Stasi magnificantly called them could sniff out dissidents. More seriously, you can read edited copies of real Stasi files and there's quite a lot of information about how the Stasi used informers and knew everything that went on in the GDR and beyond. At the moment there is an interesting special exhibition about postal interceptions by the Stasi, too.

I wouldn't recommend the DDR-Museum, though: it was a real disappointment. It's not a serious museum in which you could really learn much about life in the GDR or its history; fair enough. But it isn't really as much fun as it could be either. It's a hand-on museum where you pull out drawers and see bits and pieces of East German life - a school pupil's report cards, for instance - which is okay, except that most of the stuff isn't all that funny or amazing or evocative, and there isn't enough of it, either. There was a draw full of books to represent university life, for instance, but only one of the fabulously boring political books that the GDR used to produce - Lenin the Philosopher. The rest were truly dull things that might have been from anywhere, and I concluded that my collection of former GDR books is better than theirs. Yes, there's a Trabant you can sit in, and yes, there's quite a nice mock-up of a sitting room and kitchen, but you can only really spend about half an hour here. The best thing is the woman's wardrobe you can open: one or two of the frocks really are shockers. But with a certain utility style...

I once went to an exhibition in Prenzlauer Berg on consumerism in the GDR which was everything this isn't: really informative, with loads of stuff to gawp at - old washing-powder packets, radios, records - and truly hilarious, too. I'll never forget the huge file they had full of letters from the state telephone company giving elaborate made-up excuses for delays in installing the telephones people had waited years to acquire.