A House for Everyone?
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| 5 EUR, reduced 2,50 EUR |
| Please book your ticket in advance online or at the box office in the Foyer. |
| Duration: 90 min |
| German |
| Ground Floor, Hall 3 |
| Part of: SITE SPECIFICS |
| Belongs to: Endless Palace |
What was the cultural and political function of the Palace of the Republic and what changes can be observed during its 13 years of operation in the GDR? Marion Brasch talks about these and other questions with the former chief director of the Palast der Republik Volker Büttner, the journalist and author Joachim Hentschel and the sociologist and author Katharina Warda.
Many people remember the Palace of the Republic as a place of pleasure and entertainment. Opened in 1976 as the “House of the People”, the building attracted thousands of visitors every day with its thirteen restaurants and cafés, discotheque and bowling alley. The diversity of the programme – from concerts, readings and theatre performances to fashion shows – contributed greatly to its popularity. National and international music stars performed in the Palace of the Republic and offered visitors memorable experiences. As the seat of the People’s Chamber and a place of state representation, the Palast’s programme also had a political dimension.
participants
Born in East Berlin in 1961. After graduating from high school, the trained typesetter worked in a print shop, for various publishing houses, for the GDR Composers’ Association and for radio. Her debut novel Ab jetzt ist Ruhe was published in 2012 and was followed by three more novels and several theatre works.
Born 1939 in Leipzig. After leaving school, he moves to Berlin with his brother to join the mother. Immigration permission is granted and a job at German television (studio technology) is possible. After training as a sound technician, he leaves and starts working as a freelance assistant director. After successful work in the weekend editorial department, he was hired by the entertainment department.
After several years of very productive practice, he studied directing at the “Konrad Wolf” film academy in Babelsberg (graduating as a “university director” in 1976). Appointed to the Palace of the Republic in 1979 for all genres of the performing arts and became head director in 1986. After the closure and a successful search for a suitable location, he founded the “Theatre of the East” as a subtenant in the (Soviet) House of Officers in Karlshorst. The initial ABM project brought together the Palast’s top technicians and was a great success. From 2000 onwards, after receiving offers, he held leading positions in regional television in Brandenburg and was an instructor at the media training centre in Neuruppin. Today, Büttner is retired and head of the Neuruppin Cultural Advisory Board.
Joachim Hentschel, born in 1969, works as a journalist and author for numerous print, online and radio media. His articles have been published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Rolling Stone, Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, Der Spiegel and Business Punk, among others, and have been featured on Deutschlandfunk and Arte. In his second book “Dann sind wir Helden – Wie mit Popmusik über die Mauer hinweg deutsche Politik gemacht wurde” (We’ll be heroes, then – How German politics was made with pop music across the Wall) (2022), he deals with the musical exchange that went back and forth between the German Democratic Republic and the Federal German Republic in the 70s and 80s, the border exchange of capital and ideas and the role of rock’n’roll in the Cold War. He lives in Berlin.
Katharina Warda is an author and sociologist. She was a fellow of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies and is doing her doctorate in Berlin and Princeton on the resistance of biographical narratives in diary blogs. Warda also works as a freelance writer with a focus on East Germany, marginalised identities, racism, classism and punk. In 2021, she was a member of the advisory board of “Kein Schlussstrich!”, a nationwide theatre project on the NSU complex. In her project “Dunkeldeutschland” (Dark Germany), she explores the post-reunification period from the social margins and illuminates blind spots in German historiography based on her own experiences as a Black East German woman in the GDR and after 1989/90.