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A national monument for the GDRThe erection of the monument in Ernst-Thälmann-Park can be regarded as the culmination and completion of the attempts since 1949 to create a national monument through a Thälmann memorial place. The buildup of the socialist state was ideologically strongly founded on referring to idealised personalities from the workers‘ movement, communism, and the antifascist resistance. This was especially the case for Ernst Thälmann. The chairman of the German Communist Party, he had been murdered in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944. The SED tried for decades to embed the picture of Thälmann as sort of a founding father of the GDR by creating honorary places in Berlin’s urban space. After a first ideas competition in 1949 the plans for a Thälmann monument in the GDR capital did not come to a result for more than 30 years. Following a number of relocations the grounds of the defunct gasworks eventually seemed to offer the opportunity to stage such a monument in a space-consuming way. Soviet sculptor Lev Kerbel was instructed by Erich Honecker personally with its realization. There having been no GDR artist taken into consideration, for example by means of an open design competition, strong criticism aroused from the Association of Fine Artists of the GDR and others, but without success. Kerbel who in 1971 had already designed the Marx monument in Karl-Marx-Stadt (until 1953 and since 1990 Chemnitz) again used the form of a monumental sculpture for the Thälmann monument in Berlin. Supporting its monumental impact as well as the overall architectural impression, the green facilities and new buildings became a conceptual element of the monument complex as part of the planning. |