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1992 |
After preventing the demolition order, an association was founded to promote the project;
the first video production is made about the Cultural Palace "Don´t Watch the Man behind
the Curtain« |
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1993 |
- 95 Restoration as a historical monument and the establishment of a »Socialist Realism«
archive; the »Palace Garden« is designed |
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1994 |
Exhibition on »Walter Dötsch: From a Pupil of Schlemmer to a Painter of the Bitterfeld Way" |
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1995 |
Exhibition on the 40th anniversary of the Cultural Palace |
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1997 |
With the Vocational School »extension«, the Palace takes on the function of a »center«
in the redeveloped industrial area - it becomes an EXPO project |
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site of the ossified utopia of socialism
A monument full of contradic- tions, reflecting both the utopia of a new society as well
as its doctrinaire constraints. The building, opened in 1954, was to have been demolished
in 1990 following the political upheavals in East Germany. The Bauhaus proposed protecting
and preserving the building as a historical monument.
From 1959 until well into the seventies, the »Bitterfeld Cultural Conference«, which was
important for East German cultural policy, was held here. Under the watchword »Pick up your
pen, mates, socialist national culture needs you!« artists were to turn to factories and
workers to art. The »Bitterfeld Way« was born. This attempt to unite emancipation, cultural
enrichment and industrial work in the tradition of the Enlightenment finally suffocated in
the ideological corset of East German politics.
Between 1992 and 1996, the Bauhaus Dessau devoted itself to preserving, redeveloping and
finding a new use for the Cultural Palace. By doing so, it also supported the town of
Bitterfeld in trying out new ideas for a multifunctional educational and cultural center
that would make the most of the Palace's significant history.
Its particular location at the entrance of the chemicals industry district necessitated
integrating the Cultural Palace conceptually into the complex structural changes which
the area was undergoing.
The Cultural Palace became the site for initiating the revaluation of the former industrial
area. The Planning Workshops were held here, and experimental theater started by the Bauhaus,
the Kurt Weill Society, amongst others.
With the »Vocational School«, an EXPO project at the Cultural Palace, a new center has
evolved.
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