Seit Anfang Mai ist die Aussichtsplattform gesperrt. Grund sind erhebliche Sicherheitsmängel, die ein Statik-Gutachten offen gelegt hat. Darin werden insbesondere die Standsicherheit und der Brandschutz kritisiert.
Wow, I had no idea this was happening. I’m glad I got up there when I did. The thrill of being up so high was part of the reason for going, of course. I noticed at the time where railings were placed, and felt no one was going to go over the edge by accident unless they climbed a barrier (which would have been quite easy to do, though you’d have to do it with intention). There were several places where the stairwell was pitch dark and you had to use a cellphone flashlight, which of course everyone had.
I liked the reclaimed nature of this place, and liked the pretentious artsy hipster vibe of both the denizens and the visitors.
The social functions of monuments and their role in creating/preserving memory is so interesting! I am ruminating over the range of fellow tourists I’ve visited sites with just in the last couple weeks.
Teufelsberg was populated overwhelmingly by young hipsters, along with a handful of guys my age who remember the time those radomes were in use. Several guys seemed to be showing the place to their sons. I remember working with a man at Symantec who’d been in the Army stationed at a listening post in Berlin. His and mine was a generation removed from the manager who continually chortled to us about the money he was making from Apple stock and who complimented a coworker that’d waited in line for the store to open upon release of the latest iToy.
At Colditz yesterday there were many English accents to be heard, as family groups marveled at the ingenuity of our parents and grandparents. And those men were ingenious – I leaned forward to read the tag on what I thought was an unusual hand-made sewing machine to learn it was in fact a blast furnace. The frigging PoWs made a blast furnace with which to produce things like keys and escape tools. I thought of the young buff soldiers I enjoyed shooting with, and tried to imagine any with the mechanical and engineering knowledge and ability to create things like a typewriter or camera.
The young and beautiful and iPhone-laden were not in evidence at Zeithain, where I talked with a very knowledgeable local man who stood at the entrance waiting for the occasional group who’d engage him as a guide. Other than us there was only the caretaker during my visit. The PoW graveyard at Neuburxdorf was even emptier – there was only one man besides myself. Whereas I was obviously just wandering he’d come for a definite purpose, to attend to a grave. We nodded to each other respectfully. I wanted to know what brought him there but couldn’t think of a way to ask.
The visitors at Mühlberg included a couple who were slowly beginning their way down the long dirt road from the parking area to the forested camp as I was leaving. They were easily in their 80s or 90s, the woman planting her walker, stepping forward a few centimeters, swinging the walker forward and planting it again, the man walking with metal crutches braced under each arm. I’d come because Vonnegut had been imprisoned at Mühlberg, but the majority of the prisoners had not been US soldiers. Tablets detailed the transit of Soviet PoWs, prisoners to and from concentration camps, then after the war those imprisoned by Stalin for the crime of having been imprisoned by Hitler, or by the DDR for a variety of reasons. I had been very affected by one narrative. The photo showed a woman who was placing flowers on the ground. The text matter of factly said that her placing a cross and flowers, and this photo was illegal during the DDR time. It was generally known the Soviets had buried people in mass graves here but the locations, numbers, names, were all unknown until after the Wall came down. People snuck on to the site and placed crosses and flowers which were regularly and methodically removed by the government. I read and reread the text and gazed for a while at the decades-old photograph of an elderly woman placing flowers.
