E I N I G K E I T
Schloss Griebenow, Greifswald 1999
“Eingkeit und Recht und Freiheit” is the first line of the German anthem, the Deutschlandlied, from 1841. After World War II, when Germany was separated, the lyrics were censored in the West, and the East got a completely new anthem, but was not allowed to sing it. The word Einigkeit was used once again as a symbol for the German reunification in 1989, and is now on German euro coins.
The Baroque castle Griebenow, in the hometown of Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, was run down after fifty years of serving as a home for the elderly in the GDR. The architecture, seen as decadent by East German standards, was neglected by officials. The garden, with a square island surrounded by an artificial lake, was still intact, although it had gone wild long before.
In 1999, ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a private investor bought the castle with the intention of rebuilding it and using it for cultural events.
The University of Greifswald organized a show at the castle with international artists and invited Lars Ø. Ramberg to create a site-specific project in the ruined banquet hall for the opening. At the time, neither heating nor electricity were available.
On his explorations crisscrossing the local area, Ramberg found a small communal garden in a nearby suburb. Surrounded by concrete residential blocks, the garden was an oasis in the middle of the GDR architecture. In the middle of it was an old, rusty, once-white steel totem pole carrying the name of the communal garden. Letters welded in steel, once red, now brownish, read EINIGKEIT.
Ramberg met with the elderly men running the garden community, who told him the totem pole had been made collaboratively after work on the local nuclear power plant in 1970. After negotiations, Ramberg was allowed to cut the sign down and borrow it for the installation in Griebenow Castle.
He installed it in the banquet hall along with temporary electricity for building sites; working lamps were lit behind every letter. From the sign, separate cords for every broken lamp on the long-forgotten chandelier provided light in the old banquet hall. A marriage between two eras, both of which had lost their energy, became the theme of Einigkeit. Just a few days after the opening, the 2,000-kilogram installation suddenly disappeared.
The castle owner had called it “a monstrosity” and effected its disappearance. Einigkeit was found weeks later, in pieces, lying in a ditch