Turning the project of dictatorship into an example of democracy? Chances and risks of participation at the Nazi relic Prora

An unfinished Strength through Joy seaside resort

Prora was built between 1937 and 1939 by the Nazi organisation Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy). It was a central construction and propaganda project of the regime. As a gigantic seaside resort, it was designed to provide 20,000 guests from working-class families with low-cost seaside holidays. The Strength through Joy seaside resort was meant to mobilise support for the regime among politically disenfranchised workers. As a gigantic holiday machine without equal in the modern world, it should have illustrated the socio-political power of the regime in the domestic and international arena.¹

During the Third Reich, however, no tourist ever saw the sea in Prora. The gigantic building never got beyond the shell and was never put into operation by the Nazis. With the outbreak of the Second World War, the project was stopped and the construction workers were relocated to projects classified as more important to the war effort. What remained was an almost 5 kilometres long, half-finished ruin on the beach.

Barracks of the German Democratic Republic

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the complex in the Soviet Occupation Zone was first occupied by refugees and later slated for demolition. However, demolition attempts failed halfway through and the complex was left abandoned.

What finally saved Prora was the intensification of the Cold War. After Stalin ordered the German party leadership in East Berlin to re-establish its armed forces, Prora was finally completed as a military base of the communist GDR in 1956. At first, mainly combat troops were stationed in Prora; later, several military schools were established there. Officers from so-called ‘Third World’ countries – with which the GDR maintained military relations, often out of ideological solidarity – were trained in Prora. It was also one of the largest bases for housing Bausoldaten (construction soldiers), the GDR’s pacifists who refused to serve with a weapon. Sealed off from the outside world and known for a harsh regime within the barracks walls, Prora always remained a threatening foreign body for the majority of the local population.

A battlefield of different stakeholders

This changed with the fall of the Berlin Wall. After German reunification in 1990, the GDR army was disbanded and the military base in Prora was finally abandoned (Figure 1). Due to the withdrawal of the military, many people in Rügen lost their jobs and the islanders had to deal with enormous changes.

Under these circumstances, Prora’s difficult past continued to weigh on Rügen. It soon became fuel for current conflicts on the island, especially when it became known that the federal government wanted to sell the huge site in its entirety to an outside investor. Plans were being prepared for a large shopping, leisure and entertainment centre with overnight accommodation for up to 6,000 people and 15,000 parking spaces for day tourists. People in Rügen did not see the government’s plans as salvation. They feared that a repurposed Prora would dominate the entire island, produce extensive car traffic and strangulate small-scale developments. Fierce resistance formed against the sale plans. With reference to the Nazi-era plans, citizens’ initiatives spoke of a ‘monster of mass tourism’ that had to be opposed.² Over the next few years, Prora evolved into a battleground of different actors, such as heritage activists, government agencies, citizen groups and investors. In the wake of this conflict, not only the past was fought over, but a wide variety of future scenarios were also projected onto the complex. Under these circumstances, the planned sale and development of the site became impossible.

Figure 1

Prora as an abandoned military base (Source: Antoine Beaudoin, 2012)

Rationalisation as a guiding principle

On 13 May 1996, Hardt-Waltherr Hämer opened the proceedings by appealing to the ‘discursive capacity of our democratic society’ in dealing with a ‘legacy of two dictatorships’.¹⁰ He quoted the acting director of the Institut für Sozialforschung (Frankfurt Institute for Social Research), Helmut Dubiel: ‘The quality of public debate is the oxygen of democracy.’¹¹ A quotation he used as a motto for the discursive process and recalled again and again in front of the discussion forums during the following months.

Regarding Dubiel, Hämer required the participants to uphold and follow three principles, which were to be expected of every ‘responsible active citizen who makes public statements’ to: (1) ‘take note of all information that can be obtained within a reasonable time in the matter in dispute’; (2) ‘examine all opposing motives and arguments in the light of impartial principles and to calculate the consequential effects of his proposal on those affected’; and (3) ‘base all his public statements not on short-term opportunity, but on principles to which he can still commit himself tomorrow’.¹² The first meeting started with these introductory words.

Negotiating the future

During the process, it quickly became apparent that the various groups on Rügen were by no means pulling in the same direction, but rather how dissonant and heterogeneous the community on the island was. While the different groups were largely united against the federal government’s plans to sell the land, conflicts and power imbalances were now coming to the surface.

First, the political representatives of the town of Binz – to whose municipal area Prora belongs – were given the opportunity to present their claims. They aimed to make pragmatic use of the building complex. It quickly became clear that, regardless of its history, Prora was seen above all as a useful resource for the politicians who were currently setting the tone in Binz. The mayor of Binz, for example, was pushing for a part of the building complex to be repurposed to provide accommodation for people who were being forced out of Binz.¹³ Hämer saw the needs presented by the mayor as a good base on which to develop a mixed-use scenario as one possible way to reach a consensus.

But the ideas of the municipality of Binz had their dark underbelly. Homelessness in Binz was a process that was actively driven by the municipality itself. The mayor openly declared to the press, ‘We have to accommodate 400 people looking for accommodation because the first rows by the sea have to be cleared,’ justifying it with ‘The silver spoons that we have brought into the German Reunification must be used.’ Binz should again become the ‘five-star seaside resort’ it was before communist times. Hotels that had been converted into living spaces were to be put back into operation. To realise this, superfluous residents must move to Prora. But Prora offered even more potential. For Binz to be a ‘five-star seaside resort’, a ‘two-star seaside resort’ was also needed as a place for not-so-well-off tourist groups. Prora was presented by the mayor as ideally suited for this.¹⁴

However, Binz’s ideas met with fierce opposition from other island communities. The tourist uses envisaged by the local politicians of Binz conjured up the spectre of mass tourism for the representatives of the island of Rügen. They continued to see Prora as a threat to the rest of the island and – in the form of a ‘two-star seaside resort’ – especially for the small guesthouses in the interior of the island. Along the way, Binz’s treatment of its own citizens was harshly criticised. The district representatives accused Binz of not doing enough to counter the ‘brutal and antisocial displacement process’ taking place in their midst.¹⁵

As a result, the district politicians positioned themselves in the discursive process with a radical counter-proposal; the majority of the listed buildings should be demolished to banish the dark ghosts of supposedly Strength through Joy style mass tourism.¹⁶ Only two blocks out of five were to be preserved and, together with the ruins, assume a ‘monument and memorial function’, which were largely unused. A second district councillor, Udo Knapp, justified the plan, ‘we can rid ourselves of the Nazi and GDR past in one fell swoop’ and linked it to the tangible interests of the local hoteliers. ‘It’s about giving the middle class that now exists on the island a chance and not a large corporation from outside.’¹⁷

As these examples show, with the initiation of the discursive process, the competing future scenarios of stakeholders quickly became the focus of the negotiations.

Throughout the negotiations, the STERN moderators tried to soften entrenched party positions. While supporting Binz’s wish to develop a mixed-use scenario for Prora, Hämer warned that to turn Prora into ‘a ghetto for the ones who did not get their fair share’¹⁸ is not in the long-term interests of Binz to misuse the difficult legacy of Prora as a container into which its problems were shunted. In the process, Hämer, as the leading moderator, repeatedly appealed to Dubiel’s principles of taking note of all information, judging it according to impartial principles, keeping an eye on the impact on those affected and thinking in the long term.

In the course of the negotiations, the STERN moderators finally succeeded in getting the parties involved to agree to Hämer’s demand for ‘the highest possible quality for Binz and Prora’¹⁹ as a common goal. The mayor of Binz then issued a clear rejection of the ‘degradation of Prora through inferior uses’.²⁰

The moderators endeavoured to detach the scenarios from the respective actors who first proposed them, so that the participants could view them neutrally. For this purpose, the scenarios previously named after political interest groups were given neutral and factual names to lessen partisanship (for example, the scenario ‘District’, which is favoured by Rügen District Council and calls for the demolition of a large part of the structure, was renamed ‘Partial Demolition and New Construction’). The individual scenarios were then neutrally examined in the course of the procedure and their advantages and disadvantages weighed up.

This careful consideration formed the basis upon which promising approaches can be extracted from different scenarios. In the further course of the process, the promising aspects are then combined into new scenarios, which should offer the possibility of creating a balance of interests and profitable syntheses for all parties involved. In contrast to the former mono-functionality of the site as an ‘Aryan’ worker’s seaside resort or as a military barrack, the guiding principle of a ‘colourful mix’ of functions emerged.

However, as these conflicts make clear, the competing futures projected onto the site are closely entangled with conflicting historical meanings, which were attached to Prora by different stakeholders. This made it necessary to simultaneously reassess the past and its material remains from a future perspective, so as to bring the future and the past into a new meaningful coexistence.

Reassessing the past

In the public eye and the press, Prora was regularly condemned for its ugliness and monstrosity, as a ‘German nightmare made of concrete’, a ‘gaping wound in the landscape’, a ‘place of garbage and junk’, ‘a materialised antithesis of culture’ and so on.²¹ It was precisely the heritage activists involved in the process who vehemently defended and wanted to preserve Prora’s off-putting appearance. They brought the relevant monument preservation authorities onto their side, who insisted at the beginning of the discursive process on maintaining the deterrent external impression, as it reinforces Prora’s character as a memorial with a dark Nazi past. Keeping Prora’s architecture in the status of an ‘eyesore’ is seen here as an important social and educational task to remember the horrors of the Nazi era.²²

The efforts of the monument preservers to freeze the building complex’s appearance in the past, as it were, were increasingly blocking the way to the future. It was therefore no wonder that in dealing with the monument preservation authorities, the STERN protagonists tried to find out whether they would accept changes that softened the overall deterrent impression of the site to make it more attractive for new uses. Art and architecture historians were called in by STERN – as external experts – to come to a better understanding of the context of the historical time in which the building was constructed as well as its palimpsest layers. STERN benefitted from the fact that during the discussion it became increasingly clear that the deterrent appearance is not so much the result of a conscious intention on behalf of the builders, but is rather the result of a complex process in which unfinished design intentions, pragmatic further use and natural processes of decay interact. As a result of these discussions, the monument conservators concluded that, in the face of new uses, a trend towards the ‘beautification’ of the site was justified and probably inevitable. However, it is a question of ‘qualified beautification and its controllability’.²³ The focus shifted to ‘the viability of the concepts to be developed and the consequences of the concepts for Rügen’²⁴; that is, future scenarios. The aesthetic and moral evaluation of the historical architecture would have to be separated more strongly here. ‘Prora was not planned to be ugly,’²⁵ despite the sinister function of the building in Nazi propaganda and the architectural gesture of power.

In the discussion, the questions ‘what should be left out, what should be allowed to be shown?’ were subsequently brought to the fore: to what extent does it make sense to ‘push back’ the ‘power gesture [of the National Socialists] towards modernism’ as an aspect more compatible with a new use?²⁶

Finally, STERN had a façade in Prora painted white which showed how a simple gesture can cancel out the deterrent impression of the facility (Figure 2).

Figure 2

A courtyard in Prora: turned from an ‘eyesore’ (on the left) into luxury apartments (on the right)

Difficult heritage as a catalyst for change

After eight months of negotiations, a proposal under the title ‘Prora for Rügen’ crystallised as the process reached its consensus. Due to the economic structure of Rügen, it relied on tourism again. As discussed earlier, STERN representatives were allowed to bring modern tourism back into the discussion without a reflexive fear of a ‘monster of mass tourism’ with the late completion of the Nazi seaside resort. In fact, STERN moderators presented 13 projects that were constructed in the early 1990s in Rügen. They alone created twice as many beds as STERN proposed as a compromise for Prora, and many similar projects were planned in Rügen. This put the spectre of Prora’s incalculable size into perspective. While tourism in Prora would make further use of already sealed buildings and areas, most of these new construction projects were built on greenfield sites and were increasingly destroying untouched nature, the island’s unique quality and most important resource.²⁷

The focus was now on re-evaluating Prora and understanding its potential – which was previously perceived as a mere burden or nightmare from the past – as an opportunity for a better future. For this purpose, the local communities should work together to redirect tourist energies to Prora and to relieve the rest of the island ecologically. The continuing use of Prora should stop the destruction of nature elsewhere on the island by eliminating the need for construction projects there. Prora could thus relieve the burden on nature locally and globally.

Likewise, as the federal government wanted to withdraw, its responsibilities should be passed on to local stakeholders. However, STERN proposed to do it in a more socially responsible way rather than letting it be governed by the principle that might be right. Profit-oriented uses such as hotels and holiday rentals were to contribute to less economically viable uses such as social housing, cultural initiatives and museums for documentation work on site (for example, by co-financing the latter with higher rents for profit-oriented uses). The principle of ‘altruism before egoism’²⁸ should apply via the implementation of local mechanisms and thus counteract the displacement mechanisms on the island, which were so obvious in the town of Binz.

To maintain the energy released in the process and to give the different groups a common focus beyond the process, STERN proposed that Rügen should present itself as a model region at EXPO 2000 in Hanover through this new approach to a difficult heritage. Rügen should reinvent itself with Prora as an example of sustainable tourism, which now deals with a dark heritage in such a way that it creates socially and ecologically sustainable structures.

The discursive process in Prora was certainly an outstanding example of how large-scale projects that are perceived as a burden can be positively developed in the future. But what can we learn about new dilemmas and conflicts that can emerge in such a process? To what extent did it succeed in ‘transforming a project of dictatorship into an example of democracy’ as the STERN protagonists had in mind?