My design for the competition “Denkzeichen Rosa Luxemburg” (Memory Marker Rosa Luxemburg; Berlin 2003) drew upon the Revolution Monument by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, which was commissioned in 1926 by the German Communist Party as the central memorial to the German revolution and then destroyed in 1935 by the National Socialists. Mies van der Rohe's large sculpture was an abstract architectural monument that alluded to an execution wall because many of the revolutionary dead were shot in front of a wall. To evoke the harshness of an execution wall, the Revolution Monument consisted of a reinforced concrete structure covered by red bricks recovered from debris. Exactly 32 cubes honor the 32 revolutionaries buried at the Revolution Monument – among them, Rosa Luxemburg.
My proposal for the “Denkzeichen Rosa Luxemburg” provided for constructing an object based on the Revolution Monument of Mies van der Rohe. The concrete building materials used in the construction of the Revolution Monument should remain visible in this object. The object should be on a scale of 1:1 (approximately 15 x 5.5 x 2.5 meters) erected on the lawn in front of the Volksbühne Berlin and placed so that the main axis of the square remains free. As with Mies van der Rohe's Revolution Monument, the newly constructed object should also be red, thus the smooth-faced concrete should be coated with a special red color.
The object on Rosa Luxemburg Platz should be a massive, reinforced concrete structure that gives the impression of being immovable and indestructible. This would refer to the circumstances of the National Socialists’ destruction of Mies van der Rohe's Revolution monument. Quotes from Rosa Luxemburg would be placed on some of the cubes projecting from the object. These texts should be prepared by stencils inserted into the concrete during its casting. Thus, the script would be written directly on to the object and about a centimeter deep. The collection of “quote blocks” would redefine and add significance to the form inherited from the Revolution Monument. The “quote blocks” are based primarily on excerpts from Luxemburg's texts “The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions” and “The Russian Revolution”, which include ideas still relevant for today’s discussions of social alternatives to the capitalist system and representative democracy.
Text quotes on the Denkzeichen Rosa Luxemburg (selection)
Only by an insight into all the fearful seriousness, all the complexity of the tasks involved, only as a result of political maturity and independence of spirit, only as a result of a capacity for critical judgement on the part of the masses, whose capacity was systematically killed by the Social-Democracy for decades under various pretexts, only thus can the genuine capacity for historical action be born in the German proletariat.
The mass strike has now become the center of the lively interest of the German and the international working-class because it is a new form of struggle, and as such is the sure symptom of a thoroughgoing internal revolution in the relations of the classes and in the conditions of the class struggle.
It is just as impossible to “propagate” the mass strike as an abstract means of struggle as it is to propagate the “revolution. “ “Revolution” like “mass strike” signifies nothing but an external form of the class struggle, which can have sense and meaning only in connection with definite political situations.
It is the historical task of the proletariat, when achieving political power, to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy – not to eliminate democracy altogether.
My design for the competition “Denkzeichen Rosa Luxemburg” (Memory Marker Rosa Luxemburg; Berlin 2003) drew upon the Revolution Monument by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, which was commissioned in 1926 by the German Communist Party as the central memorial to the German revolution and then destroyed in 1935 by the National Socialists. Mies van der Rohe's large sculpture was an abstract architectural monument that alluded to an execution wall because many of the revolutionary dead were shot in front of a wall. To evoke the harshness of an execution wall, the Revolution Monument consisted of a reinforced concrete structure covered by red bricks recovered from debris. Exactly 32 cubes honor the 32 revolutionaries buried at the Revolution Monument – among them, Rosa Luxemburg.
My proposal for the “Denkzeichen Rosa Luxemburg” provided for constructing an object based on the Revolution Monument of Mies van der Rohe. The concrete building materials used in the construction of the Revolution Monument should remain visible in this object. The object should be on a scale of 1:1 (approximately 15 x 5.5 x 2.5 meters) erected on the lawn in front of the Volksbühne Berlin and placed so that the main axis of the square remains free. As with Mies van der Rohe's Revolution Monument, the newly constructed object should also be red, thus the smooth-faced concrete should be coated with a special red color.
The object on Rosa Luxemburg Platz should be a massive, reinforced concrete structure that gives the impression of being immovable and indestructible. This would refer to the circumstances of the National Socialists’ destruction of Mies van der Rohe's Revolution monument. Quotes from Rosa Luxemburg would be placed on some of the cubes projecting from the object. These texts should be prepared by stencils inserted into the concrete during its casting. Thus, the script would be written directly on to the object and about a centimeter deep. The collection of “quote blocks” would redefine and add significance to the form inherited from the Revolution Monument. The “quote blocks” are based primarily on excerpts from Luxemburg's texts “The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions” and “The Russian Revolution”, which include ideas still relevant for today’s discussions of social alternatives to the capitalist system and representative democracy.
Text quotes on the Denkzeichen Rosa Luxemburg (selection)
Only by an insight into all the fearful seriousness, all the complexity of the tasks involved, only as a result of political maturity and independence of spirit, only as a result of a capacity for critical judgement on the part of the masses, whose capacity was systematically killed by the Social-Democracy for decades under various pretexts, only thus can the genuine capacity for historical action be born in the German proletariat.
The mass strike has now become the center of the lively interest of the German and the international working-class because it is a new form of struggle, and as such is the sure symptom of a thoroughgoing internal revolution in the relations of the classes and in the conditions of the class struggle.
It is just as impossible to “propagate” the mass strike as an abstract means of struggle as it is to propagate the “revolution. “ “Revolution” like “mass strike” signifies nothing but an external form of the class struggle, which can have sense and meaning only in connection with definite political situations.
It is the historical task of the proletariat, when achieving political power, to create a socialist democracy to replace bourgeois democracy – not to eliminate democracy altogether.