Old Prussian Prison, now Geschichtspark (Moabit)

The relationship between memory and History in Berlin is always really problematic and not simple to understand and this Park just in front of Hauptbahnhof is a very good example: a place which was almost intact has been demolish and then some years later they've made a new public park to create a conceptual memorial park for it.

The prison (a prussian one made by an english model) was built in 1842-1849, in which the prisoners were imprisoned in 520 individual cells. The prison was in nazi time "Symbol für politische Unterdrückung, Folter und Mord" (symbol of political oppression, torture and murder) after the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo created more cells wings. The prison resists to the WWII and was then used by the Allies to imprison some Nazis which had been sentenced to death. It was demolished in 1958.

The spatial impression of a cell has been modeled in a concrete sculpture and in the former central monitoring area, has been created a panopticon. In this prison were forced the men who stands agains the nazis and then killed some days before the fall of Berlin. One of these men was A. Haushofer, who wrote "the moabit sonnets". One of these sonnets (In Fesseln) has been partially painted on the che former prison walls.

To be honest the idea is really nice and is a good way of creating something with is not so strong to watch, but can give the idea of the past in a conceptual way. But the problem remains: what's the meaning to destroy our history today and then to try to recreate it 20 years later?

More infos: GSE (german)

Map: http://goo.gl/maps/MHdM9

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

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Breaking the Circle: Torgau (Sachsen)

It's really hard to talk about Torgau like a place to go for a daytrip, although you can see yourself from the pictures, it's really a nice city. The history of the city is linked with the life of Luther, but unfortunately the city in the last century is also deeply linked with the tragedy of human kind in different ways, far from the middle age and close to our stories, events for which Torgau is famous and for which it deserves a visit to the city and to the memorials and documentation centers.

Starting from the Nazi time, you can have a look at the monument just outside Fort Zinna , a fortress, which was a military prison in the Prussian army. After the abolition of military justice in the Weimar Republic, the prison was used for civilian purposes. It was expanded  in 1936 by the Wehrmacht and thus became the largest and most modern prison of the Wehrmacht .

In 1943 the fort was the seat of the imperial court-martial , which was relocated from Berlin (you can still have a look a the building of the Reichskriegsgericht - Palace of Military Justice of The Third Reich in Charlottenburg) to Potsdam and then to Torgau. From 1943 to 1945, more than a thousand were sentenced to death like in Torgau and there, as elsewhere enforced .

Another important event took place in Torgau, on 25th April 1945 the Red Army met the US-Army on the Elbe. It's the first time that the two armys meet on the German soil.

After the war, the Soviet secret police agency NKVD established its Special Camps Nos. 8 and 10 in Fort Zinna and in the nearby Seydlitz barracks. Germans and some Soviet citizens were interned here or served sentences passed by the Soviet military tribunals. The East German People's Police used the Fort Zinna prison from 1950 to 1990 as a penitentiary. In the 1950s it primarily housed political prisoners.

The Torgau Documentation and Information Center (DIZ), founded in 1991 and now under the administration of the Saxon Memorial Foundation for the commemoration of the victims of political despotism, researches and presents the history of the Torgau prisons in the permanent exhibition "Traces of Injustice". The DIZ is now hosted in the very beautiful Schloss Hartenfels.

But the brutal life of this city doesn't finish here. If you have seen the german film Barbara (2012), the main plot crosses the life of a young woman escaped from the Geschlossener Jugendwerkhof Torgau, which was a disciplinary device in the system of special homes of youth services in the DDR. The task of GJWH was reeducate the youth of DDR which was not conform with the system with military Drill, a rigid penal system, monotonous physical labor and ideological training. The result was multiple outbreaks, targeted humiliation and physical abuse, there was a series of suicides and self-mutilation, the number until today could not be definitively established. but more than 4,000 young people went through it.

More infos: WIKI
Map: http://goo.gl/maps/G5BUz

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

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KGB Residency and German-Russian Museum (Karlshorst)

On 8 May 1945 here the surrender of the German Armed Forces (Wehrmacht) signed the "Unconditional surrender" pact.

The Karlshorst building was erected between 1936 and 1938 as an officers’ mess for the German Armed Forces’ Pioneer School 1. In the Battle of Berlin at the end of April 1945, the 5th Soviet Shock Army under Colonel General Nikolai Bersarin set up its headquarters there.

After the surrender was first signed on 7 May in Rheims at the headquarters of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, it was ratified in Karlshorst in the evening of 8 to 9 May by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, General Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg and Colonel General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff. Their signatures under the unconditional surrender were accepted by Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Soviet Supreme Commander, and for the Western Headquarters Sir Arthur Tedder, British Air Marshal and Eisenhower’s deputy, with U.S. General Carl Spaatz and French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny as witnesses. These signatures ended the war in Europe and at the same time marked the boundary between two epochs of 20th century European history.

From 1945 to 1949 the building was the main office of the Soviet Military Administration. At that location on 10 October 1949 General Vasily Chuikov granted legal state authority to the first government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Between 1967 and 1994 a museum of the Soviet Armed Forces (“Museum of the Unconditional Surrender of Fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945”) was established there in remembrance of the Battle of Berlin and the German surrender.

The KGB residency in East Berlin-Karlshorst was the largest in the world; it produced as much intelligence as an entire directorate back in Moscow thanks to East German efforts. But none of this was known in the West until after the Berlin Wall had fell.

The buildings on the side of the Museum had been left for a long time abandoned, now the process of renovation has started and as usual in Berlin, the former KGB buildings are now appartments.

More infos: http://www.museum-karlshorst.de/en.html

Map: http://goo.gl/maps/0n5lA

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

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