Saving them from being forgotten. The Altglienicke Cemetery in Berlin

“Saving them from being forgotten. Giving the dead their identity back. Ripping them from the vicious circle of anonymity”. In our first conversation, Klaus Leutner remembers this as one of the solutions submitted for the competition advertised by the Berlin Senate. For the authors of the winning project, the Austrians Katharina Struber and Klaus Gruber from the Arbeitsgemeinschaft struber_gruber, and the architect’s office outside - landschaftsarchitektur, ‘living memory’ was the main impetus for the redesign of this burial site. With this in mind, they decided to look for a ‘godparent’ for each person buried there. They should then record in their handwriting just the name and dates of birth and death of the deceased. For them these individual scripts, which are supposed to light up brightly in the green glass, represented the heart of the place of remembrance. They chose this form because they believed that the responsibility for commemoration and remembrance lies with those living today. The artistic-architectural form of the memorial also allowed a place of information and remembrance to be created to allow the surviving dependents to grieve properly. The realisation of the extraordinary idea was shaped by the fact that many of those next generations were involved in the project.

However, getting to that point was anything but easy, particularly because of the visionary design which Polish employees of the Catholic Mission had come up with. They complained that there was “no symbolism” in the award-winning project and continued: “An important symbol for us Poles [author’s emphasis- W.D.] would be a cross - not only for our religion but also for the civilisation of the last 1,000 years.” The names should also be carved into stone tablets. In this context, Mr Woźniak found the project, which had received the award and was due to be actioned, “amateurish”. 

I ask myself what right Woźniak has to voice his opinion on behalf of all Poles and whether Polish tradition can only be represented by stone carvings and the erecting of crosses wherever a Pole has ever set foot... And what about the Jewish prisoners that are buried here...? Mr Woźniak has not even thought about them. And that is not all: In the Polish world, voices are clamouring for the ashes of a murdered victim, for example a priest, to be symbolically moved to his native soil. That is to say: “As a symbolic gesture: A Pole returns home after 70 years.”