When I first moved to Berlin in 2010, we had rented an apartment in Prenzlauer Berg sight unseen and it was my job to pick up the keys and take the first look. The winter that year was dragging hard into a grey and dreary March. I got off the S-Bahn at Greifswalderstraße and made my way south by foot and came across this:
Yep. Definitely the Eastern part of Berlin. At the time I thought it was Soviet revolutionary Vladimir Lenin – graffiti covered the name as it does until the city cleans it off about six times a year. I quickly discovered that this was actually Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German Communist Party in the Weimar Era.
The massive Lenin statue that had once loomed over a square in neighbouring Friedrichshain had already been gone for 19 years at that point. In 1991, all 19 meters of red Ukrainian granite had been taken apart and buried in a forest on the outskirts of town.
In post-reunification Berlin, what monuments stayed and which had to go has not always been consistent. Why did Thälmann survive and Lenin get tossed into the dustbin of history? Yes, Thälmann has a billowing flag adorned with the hammer and sickle, but he’s been spared because of a confluence of obscurity, expense and victimhood. While Lenin was situated in the middle of square and the centerpiece of a neighbourhood, Thälmann is tucked into an unpopular park surrounded by high-rise towers in a quiet part of Prenzlauer Berg. Unless you end up on the M4 tram taking a short-cut to Alexanderplatz, you don’t see him unless you are a local. Getting rid of that much bronze and marble won’t be cheap either. Dismantling Lenin cost the city over 100,000 DM in 1991 (around €50,000) and after that there was less enthusiasm for a full sweep of old monuments even from ardent anti-communists.
Superfluous Answers to Necessary Questions 