From the editor
Prora is originally the name of a part of the coast of the island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea. In the 1930s, it was decided to build the Rügen Resort there by the Nazi organization Strength Through Joy, a division of the German Labor Front dedicated to leisure - and vacation travel - of the population. The competition for the project was won by the architect Clemens Klotz, and the assembly hall, located in the middle of the nearly five-kilometer-long building, was planned to be built according to the design of Erich zu Putlitz.
The windows of all the rooms of the complex for 20,000 guests overlooked the sea. A military appointment was also envisaged: a hospital. Construction began in 1936, but with the outbreak of the war, in 1939, it was suspended: they managed to build "sleeping" buildings, and the public blocks between them, except for one, remained on paper. They did not even begin to build the main hall, but they managed to arrange a ceremonial square in front of it.
During the war, in addition to the immediately conceived hospital, they trained police battalions, signalmen of the auxiliary service for the Navy, and set up a camp for refugees from Eastern Europe. At the end of 1945, Soviet troops were housed in the complex, and since 1952 - army units of the GDR. They occupied Prora until the unification of Germany, when it passed to the Bundeswehr, which, however, got rid of it already in 1991. Then it ceased to be a closed zone, and in 1992 it received the status of a monument as “the largest seaside resort in the world”, a reflection of “technical achievements 1930s "and" evidence of workers and industrial relations of their era. " During the post-war years, Prora was partly abandoned, partly destroyed, partly rebuilt. In the 2000s, it was sold piece by piece to investors who rebuild it, each to their liking, into hotels and housing with spa and fitness centers. Only the last, fifth building remains the property of the local authorities: a youth hostel with 400 beds has been opened there.
It is noteworthy that in Prora there is no state information center, only a small museum founded by an NGO, and a museum of the GDR army (this period in the history of the complex also contains dramatic and tragic pages), also opened without the participation of the state.
Denis Esakov, photographer, artist:
“The geese carrying Niels to the Swedish island of Gotland fear that the storm will carry them to the island of Rügen. It is farther south, across the Baltic Sea, which in German is the East (Ostsee). The geese escaped the storm. And last autumn I come to Rügen by train from Berlin and go to Prora, a resort between the two ports of Binz and Sassnitz. Along the coast there are five comb-buildings, each 470 meters long, with a club between them, and a little to the side - two smaller abandoned buildings. The total length is about four kilometers.
I looked for clear signs that it was a Nazi resort. But they are not. There is a museum of the history of Prora. Well, the scale itself betrays time: such gigantic, imperial objects could only have been built by the "great" modernists of the 20th century. Otherwise, this is a cute resort with a great offer of real estate, cafes, hotels, a beach and forest on the shore. Like the Estonian coastline, it resembles the landscape fantasies of Narnia."
Elena Markus, architect, architectural historian, lecturer at the Technical University of Munich (TUM):
“I have been to Prora twice: the first in the early 2000s, when I was studying to be an architect in Berlin, and the second in 2017. When I was a student, there was a discussion: what to do with this complex? There is no money for restoration, investors do not need it, demolition, since it is a monument, is also impossible.
On that visit, I was struck by the romantic desolation in Prora. This is a huge structure more than four kilometers long, in front of it is a line of pine trees and an empty beach. I didn't even get to the last building. I was amazed by the monumentality of the Propra, and it was developing not upward, but in breadth. It also turned out to be an unusually interesting architecture, which was strange - how can the architecture of National Socialism inspire inspiration? Even if it is a sanatorium. I wrote a text about this in order to understand, at least for myself: why it is important to preserve the monumental architecture of that terrible era, and what exactly may cause interest in it. On the one hand, it is, of course, the romance of ruins. On the other hand, there is the duality of monumentality, perceived primarily from a bird's eye view. At the same time, Prora bends along the coastline, so you never see her completely, and her scale is concealed, not so opposed to a person. However, this scale outside the city, in the seaside landscape, still works very strongly.
Another surprise was the combination of residential buildings traditional in shape and the public blocks planned between them with bends just like Erich Mendelssohn's (only one was built, and it is still in desolation). Until then, it was not clear to me how modernism was also part of the National Socialist architecture. Obviously, the architecture of National Socialism included different styles - the neoclassical Reich Chancellery, "pseudo-village" settlements, the functionalism of highways with overpasses and factories, but here these styles were combined in one building.
In 2017, Prora was almost completely sold out to developers who set up hotels there, including by the type of apartments, and apartments for sale, and the investor reorganization does not take into account the history of this complex in any way. Reconstruction of a completely not anonymous building according to the scheme “this is not politics, these are just walls” only enhances the heavy feeling of your presence in a place of negative memory - not only of Nazism, but also of the time of the GDR, since until the 1990s there were army barracks here and training courses were held here. battles, and the entire territory of Prora was fenced off with barbed wire. But there is no reflection, billboards offer penthouses as “a piece of the sky over Rügen” with a “dream beach” right outside the door, only a note about a tax rebate reminds of history, since this is an object of heritage: which one is not specified.
That is, investors do their best to whitewash Prora, and literally: paint with white paint. The theme of the "complex" heritage is being replaced, which is generally typical of modern Germany. Contrary to popular belief, there are a lot of buildings from the time of Nazism, but they are not noticed, they are not "thematized" in any way. Society still does not understand how to talk about it, since this is not yet a long history, like the war with Napoleon, it has to do with today.
Last semester my students were given a lecture by the architectural photographer Bettina Lokemann, who, having arrived to teach in Braunschweig, accidentally discovered a lot of Nazi-era buildings there, but they are devoid of any explanatory stands or tablets. This is in no way expressed, but a generally accepted norm of attitude towards such architecture: silence. Interesting that
The NS-Dokumentationszentrum (NS-Dokumentationszentrum) was opened in Munich, the “capital of the movement”, as it was called under Nazism, only in 2015, and even then only thanks to the many years of efforts of the professor of architecture history TUM and the first director of the university museum architecture Winfried Nerdinger (he became the first director of this center).
Against this background, it is not surprising that there is only a small non-state museum in Prora, but not a single stand or plaque. Of course, the authorities are to blame here for selling such a complex object to investors without any concept.
Naturally, it would be naive to preserve this huge building as a ruin, it had to be revived - but to work with it consciously. What was needed was an architectural project that posed questions - what is the scale and “seriality” of Prora, how to deal with them? They need to be emphasized or pacified, formulated their attitude, "thematized" - but just not ignored, as it happens now, and then any tourist immediately, without a sign, will understand that this is not just a resort on the seashore."
