Stalin Monument (Berlin)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Stalin monument in Berlin-Friedrichshain , 1951

The Berlin Stalin monument was a larger than life bronze statue of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin , an unsigned work by the Soviet sculptor Nikolai Tomski . The monument was unveiled on August 3, 1951 by Walter Ulbricht , Secretary General of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). The location, the Stalinallee in the East Berlin district of Friedrichshain , had already received its name in December 1949. Set up opposite the German Sports Hall , the monument was the scene of central rallies and demonstrations until the SED leadership had it cleared on the night of November 13-14, 1961. In its place a green area was created. On the same day, Stalinallee was named Karl-Marx-Allee from Alexanderplatz to Frankfurter Tor . The material of the melted down sculpture was used to make bronze figures for the Berlin Zoo .

How Berlin got the memorial

After the unveiling of the monument, 1951

At the end of the 1940s, Berlin had started to rebuild the Große Frankfurter Straße, which was badly damaged in World War II, according to plans by the city planning officer Hans Scharoun in the international style . After the founding of the GDR , its government changed the plans in a programmatic sense. Now a representative east-west thoroughfare based on the Soviet model was to be built in a “national” style . With Stalin's 70th birthday, a few weeks after the founding of the state, Stalin was also widely worshiped as the “genius of humanity”, the “best friend of the German people”, the “brilliant leader of the world peace camp” and “leader and teacher of humanity in the struggle for peace "Democracy and Socialism" used by the SED and state propaganda. The SED took Stalin's 70th birthday on December 21, 1949 as an opportunity to inaugurate the first new buildings at a mass rally and to rename Grosse Frankfurter Strasse into Stalinallee .

For the III. The World Festival of Youth and Students , which was to begin in Berlin on August 5, 1951, was intended to be Stalinallee as a representation and demonstration mile. In July 1951 Ulbricht bought a statue of Stalin in the Soviet Union for her decoration in collaboration with the GDR representative in Moscow, Rudolf Appelt . Instead of the desired 16-meter-high statue, at the end of July the Soviet Union was only able to deliver a replica of a 4.80-meter-high Tomski's bronze statue from a Leningrad foundry. Other copies made there were in Tashkent , Simferopol , Rostov-on-Don and Ulan Bator . The transport to the GDR took place by air. The GDR government paid for the whole thing. At the request of the SED Politburo, two plaster replicas , which were sent on loan and intended for interiors, were allowed to remain in the GDR.

The SED propaganda kept Tomski's authorship a secret in order to conceal the fact that the sculpture was not unique. She started a legend according to which a Leningrad Komsomol delegation had given the sculpture to the Berlin magistrate .

List of monuments

Funeral march at the Stalin monument on the occasion of the death of Stalin , 1953

On August 3, 1951, Walter Ulbricht solemnly unveiled the memorial in the presence of GDR President Wilhelm Pieck and Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl . It showed the Soviet head of party and government as a Marshal of the Soviet Union adorned only with the Order of Hero of Socialist Labor . Stalin's right hand, tucked under the button placket, was reminiscent of Napoleon Bonaparte , while the left held a scroll that identified him as a planner of the large buildings of communism or a constitution- maker. The slightly conical , approximately three-meter-high base made of marble , concrete or sandstone stood on a brick pedestal. In the rear area, the monument was surrounded by a lightly laid out pine forest on an open space between the new building blocks B-South on Andreasstraße and C-South on Koppenstraße, which were completed in late autumn 1952. The plan was to move it to Strausberger Platz later .

Between installation and demolition

The Stalin monument was the destination of Berlin and foreign delegations on numerous occasions in the GDR festival calendar ; it was visited by high-profile visitors on the “ protocol route ” in East Berlin. At major events in closed rooms, such as the SED celebratory event on the 28th anniversary of Lenin's death on January 21, 1952 in the Friedrichstadt-Palast in Berlin or the FDJ's fourth parliament in May 1952 on the Leipzig Exhibition Center, plaster replicas welcomed the participants.

Stalin died on March 5, 1953. On the day of his burial in Moscow on March 9, the memorial in East Berlin was the target of a more than seven-hour funeral march. On May 1, 1953 , one of the plaster replicas at the location of the cleared monument to Frederick the Great on the boulevard Unter den Linden gave the celebrants a second opportunity to commemorate the deceased.

The popular uprising on June 17, 1953 in the GDR began the day before with demonstrations by construction workers in Stalinallee. On June 17th there were critical situations at the Stalin monument. The memorial was pelted with stones but not damaged.

As early as December 1954, Nikita Khrushchev, in the power struggle to succeed Stalin at an all-union building conference in Moscow, initiated the abandonment of the Stalinist conception of architecture by calling for "industrial construction" in its place. Ulbricht followed the Soviet guidelines as the main speaker at the 1st building conference of the GDR in April 1955 in tactically convoluted formulations. The speech initially brought about a standstill for architecture and urban planning in the GDR. It was clear that with the turnaround, the transfer of the Stalin monument to Strausberger Platz was ruled out.

A few weeks after the unveiling of the last Stalin monument in the GDR in Hettstedt , the party chairman Khrushchev named on the XX. Party congress of the CPSU in February 1956 in its secret speech on the personality cult and its consequences, excesses of the Stalin cult and crimes of Stalin . Without there being any public discussion in the GDR, the SED cautiously dampened the previously practiced daily worship of Stalin.

The complete end of the Stalin cult in the Soviet Union and its brother countries went from the XXII. CPSU party congress in October 1961. After a condemnation of Stalin, the party was on the final day, 31 October, the mummified corpse of the dictator from his glass coffin in the mausoleum on Red Square remove in Moscow and under a portrait herme in a single grave of Kremlin Wall Necropolis bury. The honors to Stalin in words and pictures, songs, films and memorials disappeared from public space over the next few weeks and months. The cities, mountains, institutions and businesses, streets and squares named after him were given new names.

The disappearance of the monument

Stalin's rescued ear in Café Sibylle
Location of the Stalin monument in 2009

The SED immediately joined the end of the Stalin cult. On November 7, 1961, the Politburo of the SED issued instructions to the Berlin magistrate. When, on the morning of November 14, 1961, the central organ of the New Germany SED announced under the heading “Communication from the Magistrate of Greater Berlin” that it had decided at its meeting on November 13, 1961, “after taking note of the materials of the XXII. Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [...] with regard to the violations of revolutionary legality and the serious consequences that occurred during the period of Stalin's personality cult, “to rename the Stalinallee with the S-Bahn and U-Bahn station of the same name , to remove the Stalin monument and To delete the addition J. W. Stalin in the name of the VEB Elektroapparatewerkes J. W. Stalin , the name of Stalin and his memorial were removed from all over the Stalinallee overnight. While the Stalinallee was now visible as Karl-Marx-Allee (western section) and Frankfurter Allee (eastern section), the magistrate was silent about the whereabouts of the monument.,.

It had been pushed from the base by pioneers of the National People's Army with a bulldozer and then taken to a hall of the Bauunion plant on a low-loader . Here, members of a construction brigade led by Brigadier Gerhard Wolf, guarded by employees of the Ministry for State Security (MfS), had to shred the bronze body. The representative of the MfS gave the instruction: “The memorial is to be shredded beyond recognition. It is forbidden to take fragments with you. The matter is not discussed. ”In the early hours of the morning, pioneers leveled the base of the monument. The sculpture was melted down and its material was reused in the casting of animal figures for the Berlin zoo , presumably for a donkey, an elk and a saber-toothed tiger.

The historical and topographical literature of the GDR on the history and regional studies of Berlin kept silent about the existence of the Stalin monument and the name “Stalinallee” from 1961 until its end.

Aftermath and memory

The location of the Stalin memorial was later made unrecognizable by a fountain and the laying of new paving slabs. The German sports hall opposite was demolished in 1972. Bushes and trees have grown in the meantime, and the three well basins have been shut down.

Some construction workers commissioned with the destruction of the monument had unnoticed taken small pieces of the broken statue for themselves. The brigadier Wolf handed after the political changes of the History Workshop Stalin Allee an ear and a piece of the mustache and reported on details.

The Café Sibylle at Karl-Marx-Allee 72 shows artifacts of the monument and provides information, not in line with the current state of research, on its history and on Stalin- or Karl-Marx-Allee. The café was temporarily closed at the end of March 2018, which threatened the continued existence of the exhibition. In August 2018, the non-profit puk a malta gGmbH signed the lease for the Café Sibylle so that it can open again from October 2018.

Further Stalin monuments in the GDR

Inauguration of the Stalin monument in Burg on May 10, 1954
Honorary post of the barracked people's police on November 7, 1953, the anniversary of the October Revolution , in front of the bronze duplicate of the Stalin statue on Karl-Marx-Platz in Leipzig
Copy of the monument in Leipzig , 1952
Commemoration at the Stalin monument in Riesa on March 4, 1954

In other cities in the GDR, too, memorials in honor of Stalin were erected in prestigious places until 1955 and, in 1961, similar to the Berlin memorial, they were removed without public discussion.

  • Leipzig received a Stalin monument in 1952. It was a bronze cast of the Berlin monument made by Seiler & Siebert in Schöneiche near Berlin . It was shown for the first time in Leipzig in December 1952 at the celebration of Stalin's 73rd birthday. Immediately after Stalin's death, in March 1953, it was installed on Karl-Marx-Platz on a makeshift wooden plinth. In 1955, the monument was dismantled and stored because it stood in the way of the new Leipzig Opera and the base had become dilapidated. The planned reorganization in Leipzig's Stalinallee at the level of the German University for Physical Culture and the Sports Forum was no longer possible in view of the cautious de-Stalinization that began in 1956 . The statue disappeared without a trace in the following years, presumably it was melted down.
  • Stalinstadt (since November 1961: Eisenhüttenstadt): The Dresden sculptor Johannes Friedrich Rogge had made a design in 1952 that was never executed.
  • Riesa : On March 4, 1954, Pushkinplatz received the first statue of Stalin created by a GDR sculptor. The monument was also made by Friedrich Rogge and was cast in the Lauchhammer art and bell foundry .
  • Gera : The district town received on March 5, 1954 colossal bust of Stalin. It was stored in a museum depot after 1961 and the head was later severed.
  • Burg near Magdeburg : Representatives of communal institutions as well as political parties and mass organizations unveiled a Stalin monument on the occasion of the liberation day on May 8, 1954. The Magdeburg sculptor Max Roßdeutscher had made the bust.
  • Freiberg : A memorial created by Otto Winkler was inaugurated here on May 8, 1954.
  • Falkensee : The city administration commissioned the local sculptor Kurt Zobel to design one bust for Stalin and one for Lenin as part of the National Reconstruction Project in 1954/1955 . The two sculptures were made of gray-black artificial stone, placed on concrete pedestals and were placed on lawns at the “entrance” to Stalin-Allee (since 1990: Hansastraße). The Stalin bust was removed from the five-meter-high monuments in 1961 and smashed. A Karl Marx bust, again from Kurt Zobel's workshop, was placed on the base at short notice . Marx and Lenin were dismantled in 1990 and placed on smaller plinths in the courtyard of the local history museum.
  • Weimar : Between 1955 and 1956 there was a bronze Stalin monument on the east side of Weimarplatz . It was dismantled after almost a year because it was not stable.
  • Hettstedt : In December 1955 Otto Winkler erected the last Stalin monument in the GDR on Stalin's 76th birthday. It was a variant of his monument from the previous year in Freiberg.

literature

  • Andreas Engwert: Iconography of the Stalin cult in the GDR . In the S. u. Hubertus Knabe (Ed.): The red god. Stalin and the Germans . Lukas, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86732-298-0 , pp. 129–157.
  • Jan Feustel : Walks in Friedrichshain . Haude and Spener, Berlin, 1994, ISBN 3-7759-0357-7 ; Berlinische Reminiszenzen, Volume 64, pp. 105–117: The longest architectural monument in Germany - Through the former Stalinallee .

Web links

Commons : Stalindenkmal  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Commons : Stalin-Stillbild Augustusplatz Leipzig  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Andreas Engwert: Iconography of the Stalin cult in the GDR (lit.), there also all quotations, pp. 133-136
  2. ↑ Andreas Engwert: Iconography of the Stalin Cult in the GDR (lit.), p. 130
  3. ↑ It was unclear to monument experts which Soviet artist had created the statue. Wording (in Russian) a speech of Nikita Khrushchev to Stalin monuments in front of the CPSU Central Committee of 26 May 1953 according to which this was Tomsky, confirmed Der Tagesspiegel on 26 January 2018. The report by Bernhard Schulz: statue of Soviet dictator again in Berlin. New exhibition is dedicated to the Stalin cult for the loan of an identical monument from Ulan Bator for an exhibition at the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial . It bears Tomski's original signature, which is missing on the copy in Berlin.
  4. ↑ Brief information on the Stalin monument in the Friedrichshain Chronicle ; Retrieved September 14, 2009
  5. ↑ a b c Stalin monument . In: District lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein
  6. ^ A b Exhibition in the Café Sibylle , Karl-Marx-Allee 72
  7. ↑ The eyewitness 1952/05; 1st contribution
  8. ↑ Chronicle Friedrichshain on June 17, 1953; Retrieved September 14, 2009
  9. ^ Film by Artem Demenok and Andreas Schmidt: Heroes without fame. June 17, 1953. Broadcast manuscript; Retrieved September 15, 2009
  10. ↑ Christine Hannemann: The plate industrialized housing in the GDR. Vieweg u. Teubner, Wiesbaden 1996, ISBN 978-3-322-91762-1 , p. 56 ff.
  11. ^ Valentina Vlasic : Walter Ulbricht's conception of art and the consequences . Verlag am Park, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-89793-135-0 , pp. 129-134
  12. ↑ Stefan Wolle : Departure to Utopia. Everyday life and rule in the GDR 1961–1971. Ch. Links, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-86153-619-2 , p. 128 f.
  13. ↑ Stefan Wolle: Departure to Utopia. Everyday life and rule in the GDR 1961–1971. Ch.links, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-86153-619-2 , p. 129
  14. ↑ Cf. Gerhard Keiderling , Percy Stulz : Berlin 1945 to 1968. On the history of the capital of the GDR and the independent political unit of West Berlin . Dietz, Berlin 1970 a. Joachim Herrmann (Ed.): Berlin. Results of the local history inventory . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1987, ISBN 978-3-05-000379-5 .
  15. ↑ Note from the Stalinallee history workshop on the exhibition in Café Sibylle ( Memento of the original from March 20, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; accessed on March 18, 2018 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.karlmarxallee.eu
  16. ↑ Stefan Strauss: Dispute, extortion, terminations. The Café Sibylle is threatened with closure. In: Berliner Zeitung , March 9, 2018
  17. ↑ "Sibylle" is alive . At: rbb24 , August 21, 2018
  18. ↑ a b Homepage GDR knowledge , details on the Stalin cult ; Retrieved September 15, 2009.
  19. ^ Museum asks for help: Fate of Leipzig monuments. Publication of the Leipzig City History Museum with information on the Leipzig Stalin Monument on the occasion of the leading European trade fair for monument preservation, restoration and renovation of old buildings from November 8 to 10, 2018 in Leipzig .
  20. ↑ Description of the monument in Riesa according to the text on the ADN photo .
  21. ↑ Andreas Engwert: Iconography of the Stalin Cult in the GDR (lit.), p. 140.
  22. ↑ Description of the monument in Burg according to the text on the ADN photo.
  23. ^ Monument to Joseph Stalin . Image in the image index of art and architecture .
  24. ^ Information from the explanation board at the Falkensee Local History Museum; September 2012
  25. ↑ Gauforum , u. a. with brief information on the Stalin monument on Karl-Marx-Platz , accessed on January 20, 2018.
  26. ↑ Andreas Engwert: Iconography of the Stalin Cult in the GDR (lit.), p. 140.

Coordinates: 52 ° 31 '3.1 "  N , 13 ° 26' 4.8"  E