Berlin has plenty of abandoned buildings with a disturbing history. Often they’re turned into techno clubs, art spaces or unaffordable lofts. But a complex at Bogensee lake, hidden deep in the woods north of the city, has such a troubled past that it – apart from the odd festival held here – has sat empty for over two decades now. Today, it is overgrown with bushes, and no one is quite sure what to do with it.
The Nazis used this space so that Goebbels could relax from long days of planning genocide and “total war”.
The villa resembles a ridiculously large farmhouse. This Waldhof, in the ominously named Heimatschutz (“homeland preservation”) style, was built for Joseph Goebbels in 1939. The city of Berlin had given the land to the Nazi propaganda minister for his 39th birthday. In this 1,600-square-metre mansion, Goebbels watched movies in a private theatre and rendezvoused with lovers. Only after Hitler admonished him to stop his affairs did Goebbels move his family to the country retreat.
Within just a few years, the site was radically repurposed. After the war, the Free German Youth (FDJ) founded the Youth Academy Wilhelm Pieck here in 1946. Pieck later became the first president of the DDR, and had once been a collaborator of Rosa Luxemburg. This was a training centre for the FDJ, the state’s official youth organisation. The enormous Nazi villa was soon too small, and in the early 1950s, a new campus was added.
Walter Ulbricht, the DDR’s Stalinist boss, rejected plans for a leafy forest campus, instead demanding buildings in the socialist classicist style. Following Ulbricht’s anti-modern “National Tradition”, the school buildings have columns, balustrades and reliefs. Architect Hermann Henselmann had previously designed some of Stalinallee’s apartment blocks, and they look quite similar, yet completely out of place among the trees.
A Communist school
In 1958, a decade after the FDJ started training its cadres in Marxism-Leninism here, the school began inviting international guests. Young communists and anti-colonial fighters came to Bogensee from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and western Europe. Big contingents came from Cuba, Chile, Nicaragua and South Africa – countries with mass movements supported by the East German government. The DDR was the only country in the Eastern Bloc with such an institution, besides the Higher Komsomol School in Moscow.
Over the next three decades, a total of 3,500 international students took one-year courses in the DDR’s state ideology, alongside a total of roughly 10,000 East Germans. By the 1980s, 500 people were living on the campus, and half of them were foreign students from 80 different countries. They slept in four-bed dorm rooms, divided by gender and nationality, and attended lectures in a 560-seat auditorium with 18 translation booths.
The curriculum was boring and dogmatic, with teachers reluctant to engage with Marxist ideas from outside the canon of ‘really existing socialism’. Instead, they expected students to memorise precepts from official textbooks – often a challenge for young people who were rebels in their home countries. The FDJ members thought more like apparatchiks and struck their international comrades as somewhat apolitical.
In the 1950s, the architects worried that students would be “isolated from the masses of working people, living on an island in the forest”. Could young people seriously engage in social science if they were so far away from Berlin, “the focal point of political events”? Then, as now, Bogensee was hard to reach, with the last bus leaving at half eight at night.
Detlef Siegfried, who attended the school in the 1980s as a young communist from West Germany (and later wrote an academic history of the place), recalls taking full-day trips to East Berlin on the weekends. But with 500 young people from around the world living by the lake, he never felt bored: “There was always something going on,” he says. There were official and unofficial celebrations, dances, plays and even concerts by East Germany’s biggest rock bands, like the Pudhys and Oktoberklub.
Cultural conflicts
In the 1970s, young communists from Denmark and other Western countries arrived in the DDR with long hair and ratty clothes. Excited to be in a workers’ and farmers’ state, they were soon confronted with the conservative, stuffy reality of the East. Bus drivers wouldn’t let them get on and waiters refused to serve them: “Go to the barber’s first, or you’ll get nothing to drink here.”
Cultural conflicts continued inside the school. In 1963, a memo noted that most international “friends” had silently boycotted the ceremony for Ulbricht’s 70th birthday – the personality cult had fallen out of favour among Western communists. Bogensee was one of just a few places where DDR citizens could live together with foreigners, and vice versa. Despite the state’s internationalist doctrine, everyday racism popped up in the form of discriminatory language or overblown curiosity in a country with the few non-white residents.
The most intractable problems centred on sexuality – how could it be any different with hundreds of young people living communally? The school tried to enforce a policy of celibacy, but with limited success. This was partly due to Stalinist prudery, but the motivation was essentially bureaucratic: if a relationship between a DDR citizen and a foreigner resulted in a pregnancy, the former might want to leave the country, or the latter could want to stay. Both outcomes were considered highly undesirable (so much paperwork!), so authorities tried to prevent them.
Ruins and remnants
Kirsi Marie Liimatainen from Finland studied at Bogensee in 1988/89, leaving just a few months before the DDR collapsed. Twenty years later, she set off to find some of her former international comrades; facing repression in their home countries, many only used pseudonyms. In the documentary Comrade, Where Are You Today?, she met up with former young communists in Bolivia, Chile, Lebanon and South Africa.
This summer, The New York Times visited the “quietly rotting” complex and published an article that lumps the Nazis and the Stalinists together as “two German dictatorships in succession”. Sarah Maslin Nir wrote that the campus “echoes with the pasts of two totalitarian regimes”. The equivalence drawn between the Third Reich and the DDR is fashionable today, but is it accurate?
These were indeed two dictatorships, but Bogensee highlights the differences. The Nazis used this space so that Goebbels could relax from long days of planning genocide and “total war”. The Stalinists, in contrast, offered free schooling to young South Africans fighting against Apartheid or Chileans opposing the Pinochet dictatorship. Not exactly morally equivalent. There is so much to criticise about the DDR, but comparing it to Nazism is grotesque.
The Wilhelm Pieck Youth Academy wound up along with the DDR in 1990. From 1991 to 1999, it was used as a conference hotel for social workers, but for 25 years, it has been abandoned. The BIM Berliner Immobilienmanagement, owned by the city, spends €250,000 per year to keep the property from falling apart. As a result, it is in surprisingly good condition, with broken windows boarded up – unfortunately for urban explorers.
But what to do with it? Berlin would love to give it away – and even threatened to tear it down by the end of the year if no one took it. The problem is finding someone who could use such a huge compound in the middle of nowhere – and they can’t be Goebbels fans either. Jörg von Bilavsky from the cultural department of the Wandlitz municipality, which includes Bogensee, explains that they are applying for funds in order to study potential uses. This would include figuring out how to improve transport. For now, however, there is a moratorium on demolition: “It will not be torn down in the next two or three years,” he says.
One solution we can envision would be to turn the ruins into a festival site. There are few neighbours to mind loud beats, and the courtyard could be a dance floor with the dorms used for resting. Even without the Marxism-Leninism of years past, this would maintain some of the old internationalist vibe.
