Historical park Former cell prison Moabit

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Historical park Former cell prison Moabit

The Historical Park Former Cell Prison Moabit is located on the property of the listed former cell prison Lehrter Strasse in the Berlin district of Moabit in the Mitte district .

history

The former prison was demolished in 1957/58 with the exception of a few prison walls and seven civil servants' houses in the northern area of ​​today's park. This was intended to create space for an expressway, the so-called “West Tangent”. Part of the cemetery where prisoners were buried was de- dedicated and used as an allotment garden. Only the official cemetery has survived to this day . The prison officials were buried here separately from the prisoners. In the following years, the site was used provisionally as a storage area, scrapyard and car repair shops. From 1970 to 1973 a block of flats was built in the area of ​​the former main entrance to the prison, and from 1973 to 1974 a parking garage. Four of the seven civil servants' houses were demolished for this purpose. The rest of the area should first give way to a motorway. Later plans envisaged a block-like development, finally a residential development with a green area. Citizens' protests in 1983 meant that planning to build the western bypass was not pursued any further.

Aerial photo of the remains of the cell prison, 1997

Seven years later a new zoning plan was drawn up. Now the historical importance of the site was recognized and planning for today's historical park began. Two years later, the Berlin Senate placed the remaining parts of the approximately five-meter-high prison wall, the officials cemetery and three of the officials' houses under monument protection. Due to the reunification , however, these plans also became obsolete: the plan was now to run the Tiergarten tunnel over the site. After intensive discussions, however, these plans were changed so that the tunnel ends east of the site. Work began in 2003 under the direction of the Berlin landscape architecture firm Glaßer and Dagenbach , which was successfully completed on October 26, 2006 with the opening. The city invested a total of around 3.1 million euros in the park.

Park design

Draft of the park design by Glaßer and Dagenbach

The 28,000 m² park is bounded in the north, south and east by the still preserved prison wall. To the west is a block of flats which is accessed from Lehrter Straße . The site is divided into two halves: In the western part, a “romantic landscape was planned as a reminiscence of the overgrown deposit of the West Berlin civil engineering office from 1960 to 1990”, the other half as a “strict Jardin à la française”. This combination is praised in specialist circles as a "difficult balancing act between memory and memorial kitsch, relaxation and chatter". In the western part of the park, in the former weighing house, there is a star labyrinth by Gabriele Rosskamp and Serge Petit , which was designed from material that remained from the former warehouse. It consists, for example, of old natural stone paving , remnants of the red sandstone that was used to build the Moltke Bridge , or parts of the fountain in front of the zoological garden . With the star labyrinth, the artists want to remind that the prisoners only had a clear view of the stars at night. Critics see it as an “all too free approach to the various historical epochs that shaped the area”. There are also some play areas that were designed by a Moabit association for children and young people. These play and learning objects also relate to the location, such as the installations by Bärbel Rothhaar in the form of a climbing wall with cutouts made of keyholes, the seat wall with key prints or the plant beds and the sandpit, which were also designed in the form of a keyhole. These objects are framed by pine , birch and locust .

The park can be entered from three entrances, which have been designed differently. The entrance doors show the prison floor plan when closed on the lock cases. If you use the entrance on Invalidenstraße or Bundesstraße 96 , the star-shaped floor plan of the former prison becomes visible: the cell wings appear through rising or sunken lawns that are bordered with curbs. Another wing of the building is indicated by copper beech hedges. They give the visitor an impression of the location and size of the cells. One of these former cells is modeled with the help of in-situ concrete . If you step into it, you will hear the sound installation Klopfzeichen by Christiane Keppler . She quotes excerpts from the 80 Moabit sonnets that Albrecht Haushofer wrote here as a prisoner in the winter of 1944/1945. Three verses from the sonnet “In Fesseln” are written in large white letters on the eastern wall of the prison: “Of all the suffering that fills this building, there is a breath of life under the masonry and iron bars, a secret tremor ...” South of this cell is located an open cuboid made of exposed concrete, which symbolizes the former panopticon of the prison. In order to achieve the structure and color of the old lime mortar joints, 2% pigment clay was added to the C35 concrete. The surfaces were then sandblasted to create the desired irregularities. To the west of this cube, the location of the former administration building is shown with the help of blood beeches. Next to these buildings there were circular courtyards in the prison where the prisoners could walk around the yard. Three of these courtyards are reproduced in the eastern part of the park: with stepping stones on the ground plan and a juniper each , around a walnut tree from the time of the prison and as a triangular exposed concrete structure .

and display information about the image
View from the Invalidenstrasse entrance into the park

In the course of the construction work, the prison wall had to be upgraded to enable the construction of the Tiergarten Spreebogen (TTS) tunnel . For this purpose, grout anchors were inserted into the buttresses .

Awards

Web links

Commons : Lehrter Strasse cell prison  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Moabit cell prison , website of memorial plaques-in-Berlin, accessed on June 30, 2013.
  2. ↑ Former Cell Prison History Park in Moabit at nextroom.at, accessed on June 30, 2013.
  3. ↑ Bauwelt: Historical Park "Former Cell Prison Moabit" in Berlin Anne Kockelkorn: Historical Park "Former Cell Prison Moabit" in Berlin , (PDF; 165 kB), Bauwelt 13, 2007, page 4f.
  4. ↑ Constanze A. Petrow: The future Lohsepark [1] , (PDF; 81 kB), website of the Hanseatic City of Hamburg, accessed on June 30, 2013.
  5. ^ Historical park of the former cell prison Moabit Playground on the subject of "Keys", 2006 , website by Bärbel Rothhaar, accessed on June 30, 2013.
  6. ↑ Historical Park Former Cell Prison in Moabit , website Baunetzwissen.de, accessed on June 30, 2013.
  7. ^ Historical Park Former Cell Prison in Moabit ( Memento from December 30, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), website of GSE Ingenieur-Gesellschaft Saar, Enseleit and Partner, accessed on June 30, 2013.
  8. ↑ Historical Park Former Cell Prison in Moabit ( Memento of the original from April 7, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Glaßer und Dagenbach website, accessed on June 30, 2013.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.glada-berlin.de
  9. ^ Historical Park Former Cell Prison in Moabit , website of the Association of German Landscape Architects, accessed on June 30, 2013.

Coordinates: 52 ° 31 '36 "  N , 13 ° 21' 58"  E