Housed in a former munitions depot in a fortress on the outskirts of Berlin is an exhibition like no other: a veritable car boot sale of statues – damaged, dismantled or dumped – dating from medieval times to the Nazis to Communism. Unveiled: Berlin and Its Monuments has for the past eight years cast an unvarnished light on German history. Yet almost no Berliners have heard of it.
I am standing in the courtyard of the citadel at Spandau, a place that has had many purposes since its first recorded mention in 1197, few of them reassuring. From the late 16th century, it became a garrison city. During the Third Reich it housed research into the nerve gases tabun and sarin. In the four decades after the second world war, Spandau became synonymous with the detention of one man: Rudolf Hess. On his death in 1987, the prison was demolished. The spot where it sat is now a supermarket.
The citadel’s director, Urte Evert, has been hoovering up statues that nobody wants, hidden away or left in warehouses. A touchscreen map at the citadel shows where the monuments were originally located. Many were on display around Berlin’s central park, Tiergarten: among them, statues of Friedrich Wilhelm III and his wife, Queen Luise (the only woman on display), decorated generals, or thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, and the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.
It is customary in German museums to attach warnings to Nazi relics. Here visitors are invited to imagine themselves in the Berlin of the 1930s. One of the more bizarre exhibits entangles the British occupying forces with the Nazi aesthetic. In the run-up to the 1936 Olympics, the much-decorated Nazi sculptor Arno Breker was commissioned to create a lifesize nude, Decathlete – the male body in triumphal form, Aryan beauty with more than a hint of homoeroticism. Postwar, the British kept it in the garden of their barracks. Only years later, when the statue had to be moved for roadworks, was its significance realised. A dedication in bold letters to Hitler had been covered up.
The cavernous halls of the depot add to the sense of menace. The pièce de résistance stands in the final room. In December 1991, the mayor of reunified Berlin decided it was time to take Lenin down from his massive plinth. Two decades earlier, a giant 19-metre-high sculpture had been unveiled to mark the centenary of the Soviet ruler’s birth. This was in Leninplatz, the start of Leninallee, in the heart of the capital of the German Democratic Republic. Demolition workers had to run the gauntlet of protesters. To the embarrassment of the authorities, the contractors couldn’t get him down: the concrete proved too tough. Another firm was found. Lenin was removed, chopped into 129 parts and buried in a forest in Müggelheim, in the south-east of the city. His four-tonne head eventually found its way to Evert’s exhibition.
Now he lies, humiliated, on his side on the floor, with four bolts that were used for the deconstruction still sticking out from his scalp. He is devoid of one ear. Some statues have lost their heads; others have had facial details removed. Many were deliberately taken off their pedestals, once-powerful figures forced to meet the visitor at eye level. Traces of their dismantling – fractures, bullet holes – have not been erased. Children are invited to clamber on top of Lenin. Visitors are encouraged to touch all of the statues – “call it the people’s appropriation”, Evert tells me. She has hosted an Israeli ballerina dancing on top of Nazi memorabilia. The metal band Rammstein shot a gruesome video here.
Since I first met Evert in 2019, she has been looking out for more booty. Two months ago, she emailed me to say she had alighted on “more toxic objects of remembrance”. I headed over quickly. In an adjacent warehouse stood several new objects, including a bust of Hitler. Made of Carrara marble and designed by Josef Limburg (who morphed effortlessly from being one of the führer’s favourites to respectable postwar sculptor), it now stands forlorn on a wooden crate. He sports a smashed nose – Evert is not sure if it was an accident or deliberate. A tiepin bearing an eagle resting on a swastika preserves his Nazi sense of decorum. This Hitler was apparently one of quite a few dotted around public offices, most of which were destroyed by allied bombing. It was found last summer during one of the many excavations around central Berlin as new buildings are constructed. “None of the other museums wanted it, so I thought I might as well take it,” Evert says. She had to obtain special permission from the local authority.
The exhibition does not focus exclusively on the Third Reich or the GDR. Berlin’s 800-year history is richer, more multilayered than that. My favourite piece is Albrecht von Ballenstedt. Otherwise known as Albert the Bear, he was the first local prince, slayer of Slavs – and now symbol of the contemporary city. Unveiled in 1903 by Kaiser Wilhelm II, the statue is the earliest known depiction of Albert; for a century it was shunted from one destination to another. Now he is lined up alongside other battered and bruised luminaries in Spandau Citadel. His story is mostly a myth, but it is a marketeer’s dream.
Berlin is beginning to reclaim its history, to redefine it. It is doing so with its characteristic intensity and bluntness. After all, what other city would dump many of its statues in a warehouse on the edge of town and expect people to find them?
• John Kampfner is the author of In Search of Berlin, published by Atlantic.
