Berlin II

Germany, as I mentioned in an earlier post, has been through a series of regimes, and been through them very quickly. All of them, except one failed government, have been heavily authoritative and repressive.

Governments use art and architecture as propaganda tools, and Berlin has quite an array of buildings and momuments that serve a political purpose. Here, for instance, is a monument in East Berlin, where the Soviet Union-controlled German Democratic Republic ruled from the end of WW II until 1990! when communism collapsed in Europe.

This monument, installed by the Communist East German government and sited in East Berlin, honors the Germans who fought against Franco on the Spanish Civil War. Sounds innocent enough and memorializes a good cause right? But the Nazi's sent troops, supplies and the infamous Condor Legion to Spain, to fight with Franco. So this monument is to Germans who went to Spain to fight the Spanish and German armies. Say what?

The propaganda purpose of this monument is to show that East (good) Germans (who were Communists, in name at any rate) fought on the side of the Spanish Republicans, while the West Germans (bad) fought on the side of Franco and Facism. In fact, only a couple hundred Germans fought on the Republic side in the Spanish Civil War, and they came from all parts of Germany, east and west included. The siting of this monument makes a propoganda statement.

In Berlin, you see the artifacts of this propaganda game in many places. In 1953 East German workers went on strike, protesting an order that they work more to increase industrial production. Soon after the strike was put down by force (Soviet tanks fired on the strikers), a statue appeared just across the border, on the main street, of a woman calling to the workers, calling them out to strike again.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, followed quickly by the re-unification of East and West Germanies into one Germany, these monuments became a problem. Some people preferred life under the Communist regime, and protests arose when plans were announced to tear down statues of Communist heros. Even Berliners who did not support the East's German Democratic Republic felt that, for good or bad, monuments and buildings constructed during the Communist years, represent an important time in Berlin's history. So, although the 60 ft high statue of Lenin has disappeared, there remain in East Berlin statues of Marx and Engels, Thalman (an early Communist) and a number of other monuments to events and people of the Communist era. The huge statue of Stalin disappeared in the 1950s, when the Soviet Union realized some rather unsavory truths about him.