Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial and The Westernized Retelling of East German Memory

The topic of German memory is quite fascinating to me. The division of the nation after the Second World War created two countries with opposing political values and different infrastructures. A separation that spanned approximately four decades, the East and West German people led very different lives under their respective governments until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. With the new and united Germany, there seem to be discussions on how to address and memorize parts of their divided past, including the forms of oppression East Germans faced during their times under the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

I had visited a particular memorial discussing the dark past of the GDR on one particularly bleak Saturday. The temperatures have started to drop around this time of the year, indicating that winter has arrived. The memorial that I intended to visit was located quite far from the bustling city center, in the Lichtenberg district in the northeastern part of Berlin. The tram I was taking arrived late at its stop in Rosenthaler Platz. It took me approximately half an hour to reach my stop at Frienwalder Street from there. I followed the sign with the German word “Gedenkstatte”, meaning memorial, written on it and walked my way to the site.

The memorial I was visiting was the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial. The site was once a former prison of the GDR secret police agency, also known as the State Security Service or the Stasi. The Stasi was utilized as a controlling and surveilling agent for the government. They were in charge of many things including collecting information on public sentiments; rooting out opponents of the regime; controlling the media; and prosecuting citizens caught trying to illegally cross the border (Krähnke et al., 2018). Although it was used as a prison for decades in the GDR times, the Hohenschönhausen prison did not originally operate as a prison site. The prison was once the canteen of the National Socialist People’s Welfare Organization. After the Second World War, it was repurposed by the Soviets into a Soviet special camp and utilized for the collection and transit of prisoners (Stein, 2016, p. 232). In 1951, the operation of the camp was handed to East Germany’s State Security Service as a main holding prison for people who are awaiting trial (Cocroft & Schofield, 2010, p. 69). Just like that, the camp was turned into a prison site that was once “unknown” to East Germans in general, at least throughout the times of the GDR.

The nescience towards the location of the prison site, despite it being situated in the capital city, was due to the prison’s status as a former Soviet special camp. We have to keep in mind that at the start of the 1950s, the GDR was a newly-founded country with a dependence on the Soviet Union. Therefore, East Germany was required to keep quiet on the subject of these special camps (Stein, 2016, p. 232). The secrecy of the site continued when it was repurposed into a prison under the secret police. Maps during the time did not mark the prison and the site was known only to some, including the residents of nearby apartments who are members of the armed forces or employees of the State Security Service themselves. The prison and how it operated was also designed to be a site of confusion where even after their release, the inmates would not be able to tell where exactly they had spent their time of detainment.

In 1994, a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Hohenschönhausen prison was turned into a memorial in site (Buckley-Zistel & Schäfer, 2014, p. 98). The Berlin Senate passed a resolution that established the former prison of Hohenschönhausen as a memorial museum with the mandate to research the history of the site; educate through publications, exhibits, as well as events; and encourage critical awareness on the topic of persecution and oppression under a communist dictatorship (Stein, 2016, p. 231). The prison was opened as a memorial museum with the prevention of the erasure of the Stasi past among one of its missions. Among the unique things about the site as a memorial is that a large number of their tours are guided by former detainees. Former inmates would share their first-hand experiences, recalling the physical and psychological abuse, sleep deprivation, and isolation they faced inside the prison site (Byrnes 2017, p. 464–465).

I was intrigued with how the prison site of Hohenschönhausen, now formally known as the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial, tries to retain and educate the people about East Germany’s Stasi past. I wondered how using former detainees as tour guides would affect the way visitors receive and process informations received on the site. I also wondered about its effects on how the site memorializes the GDR.

As I walked on the wet pavement leading towards the memorial, I looked around and observed the neighborhood around me, the neighborhood that was once supposedly filled with Stasi officers with familiarities with the Hohenschönhausen Prison. I passed a supermarket building and saw a number of people walking around the area, presumably residents of the neighborhood. The vicinity seemed quiet and unlively; having lived in the livelier area of Berlin, the neighborhood almost seemed like it belonged to another town entirely. Looking ahead, I could see that the buildings of the former prison were right in front of me.

I walked through the front gate, a door with metal bars that does not betray the impression it gives as a former prison. You can only visit the facility if you have reserved your spot in one of the daily guided tours they offer. The introduction part of the tour I booked had already started by the time I entered and paid for the ticket I reserved. I set my foot in a particularly dark room with a projected video on the wall. The video is, of course, showing the visitors the history of the rise and fall of the GDR, and especially of the site itself.

After the video had ended, the tour guide urged us to follow her outside. The smiley woman with a bright attitude greeted us and introduced herself once we were all gathered in the front courtyard. I was previously informed that a large part of the tours are guided by people who have had personal experience of being detained in Hohenschönhausen, but for the tour I booked, I was guided by a jolly historian who almost seemed out of place in this former prison vicinity. It was a gray winter day in Berlin, and neither her bright coral coat nor her cheerful way of speaking could penetrate and overwhelm the oppressive atmosphere of the site under the gloomy sky.

The guide proceeded to lead us to a three-dimension map of the prison as well as the restricted area around it. Afterward, she brought us to visit areas inside of the buildings, the cellar-turned-cells that the Soviets had once utilized; the interrogation rooms that the Stasi had used; the prisoners’ room; etcetera.

During the tour, although she herself had never been an inmate in the Hohenschönhausen prison, our guide would tell us stories about her colleagues who were once apprehended at this prison site. Our tour guide puts an emphasis on how all the inmates in the site during the times of the GDR were not there due to a committed crime, but due to being labeled as an agitator to the regime. She also emphasized how much the Secret Police or the Stasi had pursued torture methods that are more psychological, and how a lot of people are still living with the consequences of it even now (and the consequences of the GDR in general). At one point during our tour, she created an especially loud bang that imitated how the Stasi officers would disrupt the sleep of their prisoners inside their cells, driving them to discomfort or sleep deprivation. The tour ended with a speech about freedom by our guide. The group, filled with non-Germans and people from former West German states, thanked the tour guide and went our separate ways.

I walked back from the memorial feeling deeply reflective. The memorial’s approach to retelling the memory of the Eastern State Security Service is by trying to gouge deep into the visitors’ senses and incite some feelings of empathy and deep-seated horror. Although my tour guide was not one of the detainees at the Hohenschönhausen prison, she would tell personal stories of her colleagues who were once detained at the site as a way to emphasize the cruelty of the Stasi. The loud bang that she abruptly created to imitate the way the officers would disturb the prisoners from getting a peaceful rest startled me in a distressing way. It felt like the abruptness was done on purpose to get the group as close to the feelings of what the detainees might have felt when the Stasi started disrupting their sleep.

On the surface of it, the memorial seems to give an authentic feeling that showcases oppression under the GDR regime. However, keeping in mind the German division that had spanned for decades, I wonder if this separation and reunification of Germany had any effects on the way memories of East Germany are being told, on the way East German memory is being narrated in the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial. Memory is taught with consideration to how it is constructed, situated, and translated within and between different regional memory cultures (Jones, 2017, p. 27). When I discovered that the memorial was first headed by Gabriele Camphausen, a West German historian, and now by Hubertus Knabe, another West German historian, I came to be more skeptical about the narration surrounding this memorial.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the German Democratic Republic is said to have collapsed, but we hardly ever encounter the words “the collapse of the Federal Republic of Germany”. Museums and memorials about the lives, happenings, or flaws of the German Democratic Republic vary, yet lesser exist about the Federal Republic of Germany. The reunification of Germany was less about the dissolution of both the East and the West into a brand new country, but about the fall of the East and the implementation of West German policies. Following the fall of the wall, the legal entities of the East were changed and the west-German post-industrial economic and political order was established in East Germany (Mahs, 2021). In other words, you could say that West Germany loomed over and dominated the former territories of the GDR.

Inded, there seems to be a domination of West German narratives when retelling stories about German history. In the past, the memorial has been criticized for engaging in propaganda against left-wing politics (Jones, 2017, p. 32). Another interesting thing I would like to bring up is how the guided tour I participated in consisted of non-Germans and people from former West German cities. No one who originated from former East German towns was present in the group. This is not something coincidental, for the memorial’s statistics also prove that former East German visitors to the site are statistically underrepresented (Stein, 2016, p. 233).

The utilization of former inmates as tour guides is also another aspect of the memorial that has been deemed controversial. The site claims a level of authenticity in its presentation of the memorial and directly appeals to the emotional faculties of the visitor (Jones, 2011, p. 108). However, having people with personal history with the site gives a subjective retelling of history, not to mention the ethical questions behind the labor that exists on the site. One particular thing I remembered during my guided tour of the memorial is how my tour guide had told us that one particular area in the site was basically a no-go for one of her colleagues due to the trauma he had in it. I came to question, how ethical is it to have former inmates conduct guided tours on the site that carry their traumas? This question of ethics is then followed by my discovery of how in the memorial’s early years, all of the tours were guided by former inmates (Stein, 2016, p. 236). The infrastructural overhaul that East Germans faced following the reunification led to the unemployment of many East German citizens. How many of these former inmates are genuinely there to educate about the GDR oppression in ways that are allegedly distorted by the West German view of the East, and how many were simply there for the sake of employment? This post-reunification economic factor does not help against the accusation that the memorial is a West German-dominated site.

The former Stasi prison of Hohenschönhausen is a historical site that reflects the oppressive and repressive side of the German Democratic Republic. With the fall of the GDR, it feels like a natural course of event that the negative sides of the socialist country should be taught and spread to the public. That within itself does not seem to be the controversial part of this memorial. Former political prisoners were actually included among the people that advocated against the demolition of the prison site (Stein, 2016, p. 231). However, how did this memorial end up failing in attracting former East German visitors? What made many former East Germans feel that this site of memorial and education was not worth their visitation? How do former East Germans feel about the way the memorial portrays their history? To better understand the case of alleged West German-dominated retelling of East German memory, further research on this topic may prove to be beneficial.

(Initially written as an assignment for a course in the HPSA Program of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. All pictures are mine. This article was initially written like a first chapter of a research journal, and went through some modifications before being posted here. This writing was shared simply for the sake of knowledge sharing.)

References

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Mahs, J. (2021) Wishing the wall back: the struggles of eight “unification losers” in post-socialist Berlin, Urban Geography, 42:9, 1310–1332, DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2021.2007664

Stein, M.B. (2016). Narratives of Stasi Detention: Memory and History at the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial Museum. Narrative Culture, 3(2), 231–236. https://doi.org/10.13110/narrcult.3.2.0231