Second Phase: Parallel Public Initiatives

While Berlin’s senate debated an appropriate way to develop a future memorial site in Berlin- Hohenschönhausen, considered possible funds, and sought after potential investors, the public initiatives for the site’s commemorative future gained significant momentum in this phase. It is particularly striking that the public initiatives took place parallel to governmental policies of memory work during the entire decision-making process. Often acting and protesting against official deliberations and supporting those ideas they felt to be reasonable, their voices could hardly be ignored and resulted ultimately in major contributions to the state’s final decision to construct the memorial site as it appears today. Former detainees in particular expected the authorities to commence immediately with decisive action at the site. Their contribution was indispensible for institutionalizing the remembrance of the site. Thus, even before the senate came to the decision to place the entire facility under historical protection at the end of 1992, the district office, which exercised interim administrative control, spontaneously organized tours for curious citizens with the help of former detainees. Although these tours were irregular, one needs to underscore that this phenomenon ushered in a growing public interest that led to the institutionalized form of regular public accessibility in 1994.

From this point on, Hohenschönhausen began to keep well-documented statistics of annual visitors to the site. During the development of a final concept for the memorial site over the next three years, more than 21,000 people visited. This ‘bottom-up’ public initiative of

Hohenschönhausen. The grassroots endeavor brought public and former victims’ influence to bear, and rendered their opinions, knowledge, and active involvement indispensable for the state’s policy of ascertaining GDR memory work on a common basis of historical integrity. Hence, it is appropriate to assume that the spontaneous tours by former detainees played an integral role in the senate’s decision to abandon previous plans for the ultimate use of the facility as a more general national museum, a kind of documentation center about the GDR (Verheyen 167). One aspect of the plans for a national museum had been the integration of some former GDR monumental sculptures into Hohenschönhausen’s complex. The unexpected collapse of the GDR regime resulted not only in the questions of how to pursue meaningful memory-work of the GDR, but also how to proceed with hundreds of former East Berlin’s memorials and monuments that had symbolized the Bolshevik regime. After having swept away the great majority of symbols in urban spaces, the unified nation faced the task of re-appropriating these “relics” of the communist past by ascribing new meaning to them in their concept of remembering (Ladd 192-214).

The former detainees refused the aestheticization of the prison space and instead advocated for a more interactive and dynamic approach. They were compelled by the site’s authenticity, which the commemorative endeavor should preserve and even foreground. The inmates drew upon their situation as authentic representatives for the site’s memorial tasks. They felt that the site should be designed in the same spirit: they attempted to keep the complex as it has been during the SED-regime. To preserve the facility in its given form, the site should function as place of remembrance, reflection, and information. It should honor those who suffered for their resistance or opposition to the SED-regime and should symbolize the value of a life of freedom and human dignity. Fearing that the integration of monumental sculptures would

undermine the sense of authenticity of the state security prison, former prisoners convinced Berlin’s Senate to give up on these plans (Verheyen 167). This shows once again how unpredictable and sometimes fast-changing the course of GDR memory creation was during initial phase of reorientation in the post-wall era. With many places, monuments, and commemorative plans in limbo, it was all the more important for those invested in the memory process to remain flexible, and yet persistent, during the intensive and multifaceted debates about the GDR and its memory.

The liveliness with which the memory of the GDR was debated at the time was not only captured in Kleinert’s film Wege in die Nacht or in the attack on Christa Wolf and her novella

Was bleibt. This dynamic made it difficult but imperative to approach memorial creation from a

more dispassionate and historiographically grounded standpoint. The establishing of a historiography of the site was thus indicative for charting an overall concept for a future memorial site. In the case of Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, this meant that the senate began background research on the history of the prison, its mode of operation as the most important remand facility of the regime, and the conditions and procedures the detainees had to endure during their incarcerations. By assessing the site from an historical perspective, the officials hoped to enrich their understanding of the prison’s nature in the past in order to chart out plans for its future meaning. The group of historians and other experts appointed for this undertaking reported in August 1993 that little to no archival documentation with data about former inmates could be located in Berlin. The lack of this material resulted in an enormous effort by the authorities to begin a process of properly documenting the site’s history. This marked the hour of birth for the foundation Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen and, thus, the beginning of the final steps toward becoming a memorial site.

By law, the foundation would later list as its primary task to research the history of Hohenschönhausen prison from 1945-1989 (Staatskanzlei Berlin). The methodological approach that was chosen was to make eyewitness testimonies a prime source, which rendered numerous associations of former political prisoners or individual victims of the GDR indispensable for the undertaking. In this phase, a spirit of cooperative interplay between official and public forces also manifested itself in in the foundation’s law of 2000. The text stresses the importance of the site, which seeks to stand as a concrete reminder of state-organized terror. Furthermore, it emphasizes the significance of the former detainees, who witnessed the daily routine of incarceration as politically persecuted victims of the SED-regime. The incorporation of former victims at the organizational level of the foundation also bespeaks the site’s dual function as

Gedenkstätte or place of contemplation at the former site of destruction, as well as a Begegnungstätte or place to encounter and meet. The former victims actively engaged in

envisioning the site, its design, and organization, and they shared their memories of the past not only with visitors, but, most importantly, with each other.

As both Gedenk- and Begegnungstätte, the memorial site in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen emerged as groundbreaking in Germany’s post-wall era. It functioned as a model for many other memorial sites to come. The site marks, then, an important transformation of memorialization toward a multi-directionality of remembering in Germany in general. And the site specifically draws on the lively process of remembering as communal engagement. The site models how to provide a realm in which former victims gain the opportunity to experience the sense of collectivity at a shared place. By sharing their stories orally and in written form, they can communicate a past that is acknowledged by a larger community. This communal act functions as a kind of restitution; it entails what art historian Kirk Savage has called a “therapeutic”

process, when discussing memorialization in the context of the US. In the German context the site is supplemented with a collective response, a broad sense of recognition provided by the state and its society that, according to Savage, responds to the victims’ need to rebuild their sense of justice and order (107). Most importantly, however, the site invites a community to negotiate the past and to experience itself collectively through the act of remembering.