It rained when Lenin was banished from Berlin in 1991. It was raining again in Berlin when Lenin returned on Wednesday, 25 years later.
Considering the adventures he’s had in the years since, Comrade Vlad was looking remarkably fresh-faced, perhaps even a touch smug, at his return.
Just the head of East Berlin's most controversial statue has been put on display again, but he is still the star of a challenging new exhibition in the German capital, Unveiled, that examines how political memorials from one era are dealt with in the next.
Normally such works are hidden away in art depots and other historic memory holes. But the seven ruptures in Germany history between 1871 and 1989 have ensured a rich, fascinating haul for the exhibition's curators and for visitors to the exhibition in a historic fortress on Berlin's western city limits.
Strolling around the show is like being a guest at an AGM of obscure, slightly vandalised Prussian dignitaries. Kaisers without noses, dukes without arms, a round table’s worth of sword-wielding knights – and no women in sight.
The Nazi era is represented with an eight-tonne stone, festooned with old Germanic symbols, erected in December 1933 by overzealous local officials in Berlin’s well-heeled suburb of Zehlendorf.
There is also a well-proportioned decathlete nude by Arno Breker, Hitler’s favourite sculptor, but no statues of the Nazi leader himself. Third Reich mayors fell over themselves to unveil Hitler streets and squares after 1933, but historians say there were no public statutes to Hitler. Apparently the failed painter didn’t want any, sparing the curators a dilemma today.
After a fascinating stroll through forgotten German history, there he is waiting impatiently in the corner for his close-up: Lenin’s head. When the red granite statue by Nikolai Tomski was unveiled in 1970, East Germany’s Politburo leader Walter Ulbricht called it a “triumph of socialism”.
Its departure in 1991-92 was celebrated by some in Berlin as a final defeat of socialism in the city, and criticised by others as victor justice. Carved up into 130 pieces, the Berlin Lenin was buried in an unmarked grave in the sandy soil of Köpenick, east of the city. But he was never forgotten: the Lenin statue's controversial end was restaged, using computer animation, as the climax of the 2003 German comedy hit, Goodbye, Lenin!
But a quarter century on, after much of East Germany has vanished from the cityscape, raising the granite Lenin from the dead was seen as a provocation by many.
Berlin city authorities opposed unearthing the sculpture, but curator Andrea Theissen persisted and eventually got her way. But then she had to find the statue, as no one remembered exactly where it had been deposited.
Eventually a team found it last September and – after resettling a family of sand lizards who had made themselves at home there – the dig began.
“People didn’t think we would dare do it, but we did,” said Mrs Theissen. “I think the controversy helped us, because it showed how current this debate is, how much there is still to be discussed about this era.”
The decision to present only Lenin’s head is a practical one, she said: the eight-metre high exhibition hall ceilings didn’t allow the full 19m statue. But the resistance to even the Soviet leader’s head shows her just how insecure politicians often are to reminders of this particular vanished regime. Why else, she suggests, would they have worked so assiduously to remove all traces, even though the removal gives many memorials an importance they may not otherwise have had?
"Politicians often view such statues as a menetekel [omen] that must vanish," she said. "In the case of East Germany, I think it would have been better to allow more memorials stand where they were, to force us to grapple with them today."
For the first visitors to the exhibition on Wednesday, it was an interesting – if complicated – reunion with Lenin.
“I don’t think they should have removed the Lenin statue in the first place, so it’s good that it is back,” said Thomas Lehmann, who grew up in the east. “But, after what he did to the Tsar’s family, I think it’s right they’ve beheaded him.”
