Berlin’s prisons are hopelessly overcrowded. This was the first thing I learned while researching plans to build a new prison at Heidering, just outside Berlin.
“Preparations are now under way for building the prison at Heidering, and construction will begin in May 2009. The planned detention centre is intended to hold up to 648 male prisoners serving sentences of full incarcer-ation. They will be served by a staff of about 300 prison employees. Over 400 work places will be provided for the prisoners, with the aim of improving their chances of successfully reintegrating after leaving prison.“ 1
The village of Grossbeeren lies just outside the city limits of Berlin, in the federal state of Brandenburg. The city administration has owned land in the area since 1881, when it acquired Grossbeeren’s sewage farms, and this is one reason why it is building a prison here today. The farms served as part of Berlin’s main sewerage system. After being cleaned by filtration, the city’s waste water was used to irrigate the nearby vegetable fields. The vegetables were then taken back into the city to be sold. Today the site of the former sewage farms is wild and overgrown; years of cultivation have exhausted the soil, and on most of the old farms heavy metals have accumulated in the earth. Neglect has lent the fields something of a romantic atmosphere. It is here that building works are under way.
But Grossbeeren isn’t only known for its sewage farms: the town takes great pride in commemorating the battle that took place here in 1813. It was at Grossbeeren that the Prussians defeated the French troops under Napoleon, thus preventing them from entering Berlin. Every August, some of the inhabitants of Grossbeeren dress up in historical costumes and reenact the battle on their fields. A memorial stands at the crossing on the road running through the town, and next to it is a small museum. There is also an obelisk commemorating the battle of 1813, and a small pyramid built in memory of General von Bülow. Why are the locals so fond of remembering this bloodbath? It seems that, since “their powder was wet”, the soldiers of the opposing armies “beat each other with their rifle butts”. One former officer in the East German army – who enjoys dressing up as General von Bülow for the annual reenactment – has even opened his own private museum of “Prussian traditions” at the “Traditionshotel Grossbeeren 1813”. The exhibits trace the course of Prussian history, up to and including the military history of the East German state. 2
A company based near Berlin uses the industrial estate at Grossbeeren to store empty cargo containers – the kind used for loading goods onto ships in ports – so they can be “used again quickly for transportation”. The containers come here from all over the world and leave again for des-tinations all over the world.
A battlefield, a sewage farm, a storage depot for cargo containers, and now a building site: the prison is being built here because Berlin’s prisons are full to overflowing. The locals – who proudly point to their town’s proximity to the Bundestrasse 1012 and the motorway 3 – don’t want its name to be identified with a penal institution, and “Grossbeeren” will not be part of the prison’s official title. Indeed, although work has already begun at the large building site, there is so far no official indication that a prison is being constructed here. Instead, the name of the new institution will be Heidering Prison.
At a meeting in Berlin with the architect overseeing its construction, I learned that the architectural firm of Hohensinn, which won the competition to build the prison at Heidering, has some interesting ideas about modern prison design. Paradoxical as it may at first sound, human freedom and self-determination are central to their concept for the institution. According to them, prison architecture should help ensure that the inmates’ loss of freedom does not also mean the loss of all their basic human rights. “Human beings and their needs are always at the centre of our thinking. In this sense, designing a prison is no different to designing an apartment building.” 4 The firm considers it important, for example, that prisoners be able to enjoy views of the surrounding countryside or of the institution’s architecture; or that they be able to decide for themselves whether or not to prepare their food and drink in a communal kitchen. The architect told me about the experiences at the Leoben penal institution in Austria, where violent attacks on other inmates and guards had effectively disappeared thanks to the therapeutic effects of the prison’s architecture. That sounded almost incredible to me.
This has been my first real contact with prison: up until now, prison was always something that happened to other people. Standing between piles of earth in the building site’s lunar landscape, I find myself trying to imagine how people are going to live and work here in the future. Every now and then a strong wind gusts across the fields – meaning that it’s likely to be draughty in the new prison. Our microphone breaks down during shooting, the result of interference from the radio mast that stands directly behind the site, and from the wind power plants that have been built on open fields. Goods wagons and passenger trains pass by to the left and right of the site. Cyclists and dog walkers, as well as cars, travel up and down the nearby road, pausing at the edge of the building site. I wonder whether any of the piles of earth dug from the former sewage farm are contaminated with heavy metals, and try to imagine how large the prison cells are going to be. While children drive their remote-controlled toy cars around the land at the edge of the building site, two stylishly dressed cyclists suddenly appear among the mounds of earth on quad bikes. Everyone seems to have their own way of enjoying the sandy Brandenburg hills, but no one seems to realise that what’s actually being built here is a prison.
1 Press release from the Berlin Administrative Court, 2nd Feburary, 2009.
2 Hans W. Korfmann: “Preußische Uniform, kalifornische Badehose”, (“From Prussian Uniforms to Californian Swimming Trunks”), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10th August, 2006.
3 An important A-road linking Berlin with the state of Saxony to the south.
4 See the website for Grossbeeren: www.grossbeeren.de, 2nd May, 2009.
5 Interview with Josef Hohensinn: “Ein Gefängnis mit Würde und Anstand”, (“A prison where inmates can live with dignity and decency”), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 13th February, 2009.
