Stadtwunde / City Wound

Astrid Bartels and Werner Ruhnau’s memorial City Wound recalls a situation that is no longer visible in the cityscape today. Not only has the layout of the city changed drastically at the site of the memorial, but the destruction caused by WWII and the conditions under which the forced laborers had to work are also no longer present.

In 1944, an annex of the Buchenwald concentration camp was located on the site where the Rathausgalerie stands today. Named after the street where it was located, the detention center was referred to as the Schwarze Poth subcamp. It housed 20 prisoners in the beginning, with those numbers rising to 150 later on. As of mid-1944, the men (mostly Russians and Poles, as well as some French, Danes, Belgians, Dutch, Luxembourgers, and Germans) were forced to remove debris and wreckage, as well as retrieve any unexploded bombs. This hard labor was performed without sufficient provisions or medical care. Consequently, the gastrointestinal disease dysentery was the cause of four documented deaths. The number of forced laborers that survived is unclear, since the prisoners were brought back to Buchenwald in 1945 after the Allied conquest of the Ruhrgebiet.

The Schwarze Poth ran below the site of the Rathausgalerie on the Porschekanzel. It has since been completely built-over and the street no longer exists today. Since the city of Essen’s 1150th anniversary in 2002, the City Wound has been located in an enclosed staircase from the 1950s. The installation draws attention the historical situation at this site during the final years of the war. Here, seven unprocessed tree trunks are staggered across different steps and reach all the way to the ceiling. An ominous green light turns the space into a sort of stage. The tree trunks take on the appearance of torture stakes, while simultaneously seeming to function as makeshift supports for a derelict or destroyed building. In line with its title, the memorial appears as an open wound within a downtown that is completely devoted to consumption. It exposes the underlying layers that are all too easily forgotten. There is also a sign describing the concrete history of the location.

Reference: de.wikipedia.org