Event: Lichtgrenze. 25th Berlin Wall Celebration (7.-9. November)

To celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the Fall of Berlin Wall, the city has decided to have the main event together with the art installation called Lichtgrenze along 12 km of the former Berlin Wall.

"From November 7th to 9th 2014, the inner city of Berlin will be temporarily divided from Bornholmer Strasse to Mauerpark and the Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Strasse, past the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate and Checkpoint Charlie to the East Side Gallery: a light installation featuring 8,000 luminous white balloons commemorates the division of Berlin. Developed from an idea by Christopher Bauder and Marc Bauder, the installation’s emotional and visual power evokes the dimension and brutality of the Wall."

More infos: https://fallofthewall25.com

All images are under CC Creative Commons (Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works), please refer to " darioj laganà | www.norte.it "

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Inside the DDR Museum (Mitte)

This is not the first time we have a look inside some museums in Berlin (Inside the Stasi Museum, Inside the Palace of Tears or the German-Russian Museum in Karlshorst) and this time we've been invited directly by the Museum and by Federica Felicetti to take some pictures.
The DDR Museum is very central, just near the Berliner Dom, it's dedicated to the life of Berlin during the East Germany and it is usually full of tourists.
It has been recently expanded, the oldest part is made in a plattenbau buildings shape shelfs, with drawers to open, full of stories to read and original small objects to look at. Mostly all the topics of the history of DDR are covered and being and interactive museum, it is possible to drive an interactive Trabant, to visit an appartment with original DDR furniture, there's a prison room and an interrogatory room, and the new part of the museum hosts a political room and informations about the NVA.
But what is very fascinating in these kind of museums, is to look for original objects and among the others, the museum hosts a chandelier from the Palast der Republik and very important, the wall paiting "Lob des Kommunismus" by Ronald Paris (which is now in the restaurant area), that was in the abandoned Haus der Statistik (the Stasi administrative building in Alexanderplatz; the future of that building is most probably to be demolished, so at least they've saved the paiting).
They also have some other objects that are on an extended loan, like a cinema projector or the Zionkirche's rotary press, used to print the protest flyers during the DDR time, when the pastor Hans Simon gave the basement to the opposition's groups like the „Friedens- und Umweltkreis in der Zionsgemeinde“. As Federica has explained us while she was guiding through the museum, there are a lot of donations of objects made by former DDR citizens, maybe forgotten in some boxes for the last 25years. As we've already argued in OstPro Berlin - Back to the DDR for one day, "the memory of the SED-Diktatur is far away from the everyday life of people, the ideology is totally disappeared and maybe it's time to see what's left".
It's hard for a foreigner to judge a museum dedicated to local memory and history, the general feeling is positive, although the space looks sometimes too small to examine in depth all the topics. I'm sure that the former DDR citizens will love it, so full of their memories.

More infos: ddr-museum.de

Map: http://goo.gl/maps/kYyce

All images are under CC Creative Commons (Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works), please refer to " darioj laganà | www.norte.it "

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Goodbye, Plattenbau (Magdeburg)

It's hard to watch a Plattenbau and to think about something beautiful, we know it, but it's also very sad when you have to watch when they are going to be demolished, expecially in the city center of an old DDR city like Magdeburg.

The platten is a building whose structure is constructed of large, prefabricated concrete slabs. The word is a compound of Platte (in this context: panel) and Bau (building) and they were very popular in the East Germany way to response to the need of houses after the WWII and then in the 80's.

In East Germany, Plattenbau areas have been designated as Neubaugebiet (“New development area”) made in several common plattenbau designs. The most common series was the P2, followed by the WBS 70, the WHH GT 18, and Q3A. The designs were flexible and could be built as towers or rows of apartments of various heights. The platten were then decorated in different way from time to time and from city to city, with ceramics decorations, socialistic wall paintings and statues.

Unfortunately they're not very comfortable, they were small and boring in the idea that they were all the same and in the long term they'll be demolished, but unfortunately (even more) they're leaving the place for new luxury appartments which usually they don't look better, they're often just their equivalent in a contemporary way.

All images are under CC Creative Commons (Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works), please refer to " darioj laganà | www.norte.it "

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