The Chancellor laid a wreath and called on her audience to recognise the enormously important role played by those individuals who were prepared to oppose the GDR dictatorship. ‘This year in 2009 in particular, our thoughts should be with those who were brave enough to resist,’ Angela Merkel declared at the memorial site.
Hands-on history
Accompanied by the manager of the memorial site, Hubertus Knabe, and Berlin’s State Secretary for Cultural Affairs, André Schmitz, the Chancellor visited several cell blocks. Her round trip also took her to the basement of the notorious prison, which inmates dubbed the ‘U-Boot’ or submarine. In its windowless chambers the Stasi, the East German secret police, used to interrogate and torture prisoners, often for hours on end.
After her visit Angela Merkel remarked how the memorial site today makes it forcibly clear to the visitor ‘how brutally human dignity was violated here’.
With the support of former inmates Angela Merkel subsequently discussed violence and oppression during the dictatorship of the SED (the ruling party in the East German state) and her own personal experiences with twelfth grade students. ‘Even when you live in freedom you must have the courage to stand up,’ and swim against the tide if necessary,’ she encouraged the young people.
From a special camp to a secret police prison
Like hardly any other place, the site in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen mirrors the history of political persecution during the decades of communist dictatorship in East Germany. At the end of the Second World War the area was used as a special Soviet camp in which hundreds of prisoners died. Thereafter the Soviet secret police built the central Soviet remand prison for East Germany, which was subsequently taken over by the Ministry for State Security of the GDR.
Until 1990 the Stasi held individuals in Hohenschönhausen who were critical of the regime or who had tried to flee the country. In some cases it was enough to have expressed the desire to leave the GDR. Between 1951 and 1990 thousands of politically persecuted individuals were imprisoned here under intolerable conditions. They included civil rights activists like Bärbel Bohley, the writer Jürgen Fuchs and dissidents such as Rudolf Bahro.
Following German reunification the prison was closed and was declared a memorial site in 1994. Since large sections of the building and its furnishings have been left almost entirely unaltered, the complex gives an authentic impression of the brutal conditions that prevailed.
The site commemorates and explains
Every year more than 200,000 people visit the memorial site. Last year numbers were close to the 250,000 mark. About half of them were young people. Explaining the past to young people is also the focus of the educational work of the memorial.
In addition to guided visits the memorial regularly organises different exhibitions and special events such as seminars and projects. The history of the site is laid out in an information centre. In future a permanent exhibition is to provide information about the history of political persecution in East Germany, in what used to be the camp, in the main building.
The foundation is financed half by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and half by the State of Berlin. The memorial site also receives project-tied funds from other bodies including the Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur (Federal Foundation for a Contemporary Understanding of the One Party Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic).