Peace Bell (Dessau)
The peace bell in Dessau-Roßlau is a memorial for the political change in 1989 in the German Democratic Republic .
Emergence
In autumn 1989 peaceful demonstrations by the population took place throughout the GDR . In Dessau , too, there have been spontaneous peaceful demonstrations since October 20, 1989. The starting point was prayers for peace in the Johanniskirche. Under the motto “No violence” , first a few hundred and later tens of thousands of Dessau residents demonstrated.
On December 6th, after a works meeting and vote, the weapons of the combat groups stationed here were collected in the Dessau magnetic tape factory and then transported away and stored by the People's Police .
On January 30, 1990, the Round Table in Dessau decided to make the collected weapons (1250 AK-47 assault rifles , 174 light machine guns, 87 anti-tank rifles and 171 pistols) unusable. This happened the next day with the help of a tracked vehicle of the type PTS-M of the pioneer regiment Dessau-old by rolling. Then the weapon scrap was dismantled by hand and sorted according to type (metal, plastic, fabric, etc.), and the metal was melted down in a Dessau iron foundry .
The Kuratorium Friedensglocke Dessau e. V. collected donations to make a peace bell out of the former weapons. In addition, there was a competition to design the bell cage.
After the 4.2 ton chunk of steel had been stored for a long time in the courtyard of the Catholic Church of St. Peter and Paul , a bell was cast out of the weapon steel at the end of September 2000. The rib construction comes from Margarethe Schilling ; The casting was done in the ASUG foundry in Dessau with the assistance of the Perner bell foundry .
After a long dispute between the board of trustees , the city council and the city administration about the location and the design, a simple belfry made of blue-lacquered steel beams was built for the peace bell. The bell has been hanging at the entrance to Ratsgasse, opposite the town hall, since November 9, 2002 . It works with an electromechanically operated clapper .
The peace bell is now a meeting place for peace prayers and other activities. Regular meetings took place here, especially during the times of the Iraq war and the anti-Hartz demonstrations . The peace bell was publicly exhibited on the occasion of the exhibition "Peace. From Antiquity to Today" in front of the LWL Museum for Art and Culture from April 28, 2018 to September 2, 2018 in the entrance area at Domplatz Münster.
Inscriptions
- "No violence"
- "I ring for peace and freedom + without freedom no peace + without peace no freedom"
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Lisa Garn: Exhibition project Why the Dessau Peace Bell will soon be hanging in Münster - Source: https://www.mz-web.de/29861254 © 2018. MZ, March 13, 18, accessed April 27, 2018 .
Coordinates: 51 ° 50 ′ 4.6 " N , 12 ° 14 ′ 46.7" E