Minsk is a place full of contradictions. Now Western capitalism, once known for wielding the wrecking ball in the East, has restored what was once a terraced café in Potsdam. Behind it is SAP founder Hasso Plattner with his foundation Hasso Plattner Foundation.
A cult café becomes an art museum
“I thought the architecture was excellent, the counterpart to it is Egon Eiermann in the west,” says Plattner on SWR2 about his motivation for renovating the building and making it accessible to the public as an exhibition venue for his collection of GDR art.
“It was always incomprehensible to me when the Wessis came 30 years ago and talked everything down. Well, I didn’t think the constant tearing down was good, even though I’m not a DDR citizen. And after researching the Minsk, I thought it was a building worth preserving.”
Plattner bought the building in 2019 and had it renovated. In the GDR, Minsk was legendary – a place for weddings and youth initiations. The new Minsk is now a place where different times coexist.
In the past, youth initiations and weddings were celebrated here, but today Minsk pays tribute to East Modernism.
IMAGO
IMAGO / Martin Müller
Works of East Modernism on display
Only two pillars and the roof could be saved from the original structure. A mural by Ruth Wolf-Rehfeld was realized on the outside staircase, which was originally planned for a kindergarten and bears the title “Käfigwesen”. The brown-black tiled wall in the entrance hall comes from the Hedwig Bollhagen workshops.
For the current exhibition, founding director Paola Malavassi chose the motif of the political landscape: in Wolfgang Mattheuer’s work, a tiny human being strolls through excavated hills under a sky by Caspar David Friedrich. The lawsuit: “Oh Caspar David” dates back to 1975.
supremacy of western capitalism
Photos by the Canadian artist Stan Douglas, who visited Potsdam’s allotment gardens in the 1990s, hang on the top floor.
When he looks at the pictures today, he feels confirmed in his analysis: “Basically, I saw the greed of Western capitalism, which is trying to erase all traces of East Germany. It’s about oppression, it’s about two times happening in the same space and how history is understood or erased,” explains Douglas.
