Marx Engels Forum is Moving

Back in 1991, I wandered down Unten den Linden until I ran into the Marx-Engels Forum just west of Alexanderplatz and the famous Fernsehturm. In June, it was one of the first locations I sought out, and I was excited to see there was more to the monument than I originally thought--metal stelae that tell the story of socialism in a series of engraved images. I immediately asked a pair of tourists to take my photo with the great-grandfathers of communism. Only afterward did I notice that tourists love to sit on Karl's lap--the bronze of his hands is polished from so many bourgeois fannys.

Today I learned that the statues are getting moved to set up a staging area for a subway route. It seems that the move to the Karl-Liebknecht Bridge (50 meters south, facing to the west). Apparently, the plan is to return them in 2017.

Hopefully they won't be replaced with some long-gone historical reconstruction, though it would probably surprise nobody if (as in the case of the recently demolished Palast der Republik) wealthy westerners sought to do away with the DDR-relic.

New Memorial in Berlin

In commemoration of the Srebrenica massacre (July 11, 1995), Phillip Ruch has constructed a tower of shoes just in front of the Brandenburg Gate. It serves as a warning to the United Nations that it should never again simply stand by as "genocide unfolds". In July, 1995, UN peacekeepers were unable to stop the massacre of 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serbian paramilitary forces. Ultimately, he will use the shoes to spell out U.N. in the hills above Srebrenica. Today the shoes are in Berlin, you can see a video after the jump. In a New York Times story, Ratko Mladic's personal diaries from the Balkan Wars are in the hands of prosecuting attorneys in the Hague. At this point, the sources don't provide much information about Srebrenica, but they do serve to provide additional evidence undermining Serb claims that the Bosnian Serbs acted alone.

The Legacy of Stalin: Karl-Marx-Allee and Treptower Park

In 1949, the SED determined it would be appropriate to re-name the Große Frankfurter Straße “Stalinallee”. The entire borough of Friedrichshain was destroyed during the war, and after years of neglect, rebuilding was finally underway. The East German regime built a massive, 2.3 Kilometer long boulevard to honor Stalin. Each block consists of “workers-palaces” built above shop-spaces on the ground floor.

It was along this street in 1953 that the June 17 uprising occurred. After Stalin died, the street was re-named Karl-Marx-Allee. It compares favorably to similar city-planning in the Soviet Union during the 20s, when the Communists transformed cities like Kharkov and Kiev into modern expressions of party power.

Treptower Park is yet another Stalin-era monument. The memorial site covers the remains of 5000 fallen Soviet soldiers. This monument was built, in large part, with granite from Hitler's former Reichschancellory. The most impressive element of the monument is the Red Army soldier smashing a swastika with his sword while cradling a child in his free arm. Allegedly, as the Soviets were trying to cross the Landwehr Canal at Potsdamer Bridge, this young soldier risked his life to race out into the crossfire and save a terrified child. It's the kind of story that builds myths—the myth of communist humanity in the face of fascist inhumanity, and the image of a paternal Soviet Union suffering terrible losses to free the decent people of Germany from a brutal regime.