Mies van der Rohe Haus

13 June – 12 July 2026
Open 24/7

Opening event: Saturday, 13 June, 4 pm
Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery, Gudrunstr. 20, 10365 Berlin

Marking the 100th anniversary of the unveiling of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Revolution Monument, the Mies van der Rohe Haus presents Monument to a Monument to a Monument, a project by artist Nils Norman at Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery. Monument to a Monument to a Monument takes as its starting point the absence left by the original memorial, which was destroyed by the National Socialists in 1935. The project asks what utopian visions and their ruptures might mean for contemporary social and political debates.

At the centre of Monument to a Monument to a Monument is a temporary, participatory architectural structure designed by Nils Norman, around which events, discussions, and encounters will take place over the course of a month. By thinking from the perspective of what is no longer there, the project understands itself as an attempt to make memory tangible as a living, collective process.

In 1926, architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed a memorial at Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery commemorating Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and other revolutionaries murdered in 1919. The structure, more than fifteen metres long and built of red brick, is considered revolutionary in several respects. Through its abstract formal language, it made material and form themselves carriers of emotion. At the same time, it proposed an active understanding of remembrance. An open area in front of the monument, intended for speeches and gatherings, transformed it into a site of assembly and political action.

Commissioned by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), the memorial was destroyed by the National Socialists in 1935. Debate over its reconstruction continues to this day. A symposium organised by the Mies van der Rohe Haus in 2022 demonstrated that the site’s complex political history resists any straightforward call for rebuilding. Against this backdrop, Monument to a Monument to a Monument not only looks back but also critically reflects on social movements and their failed utopias in order to open up new perspectives on the present.
 

In his artistic practice, Nils Norman (*1966; lives and works in Amsterdam and Munich) brings together public space, architecture, and urbanism. His work explores the social dimensions of landscape and asks how, for whom, and by whom public space is shaped. Drawing on the legacy of the historical avant-gardes and the emancipatory potential of play, his projects imagine non-hierarchical ways of engaging with public space.

For Monument to a Monument to a Monument, Norman translates the dimensions of the original memorial into an architectural structure composed of stage elements. Its modular system echoes the dynamic façade of Mies’s design. A multi-part curtain references the visual language of early twentieth-century political banners while combining it with the modernist formal vocabulary of the period. Devoid of explicit emblems, Norman’s textile drawing becomes an open-ended inquiry into the relationship between content and form, a question that also lies at the heart of Mies’s design. By embedding the narrative dimension of stage architecture within the historical construction, the monolithic character of the original is transformed into a provisional sketch that gives form to the unfinished nature of history.

The installation is complemented by potted wildflowers and other plants recorded in Rosa Luxemburg’s botanical notes. Beginning in 1913, Luxemburg assembled an extensive herbarium, collecting plants both in freedom and during her imprisonment between 1915 and 1918. In Norman’s installation, these plants enter into dialogue with the park-like landscape of Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery.

Curated by Dennis Brzek

Monument to a Monument to a Monument is financially supported by the Senate Department for Economic Affairs, Energy and Public Enterprises as part of its funding programme for special tourism projects.

Saturday, 13 June
Nils Norman: Monument to a Monument to a Monument
Opening Event
Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery (Revolution Monument)
4:00 pm

No registration required.
 

Sunday, 14 June
Guided Tour of Mies van der Rohe’s Revolution Monument
Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery (meeting point: main entrance)
1:00 pm (in German)

Free of charge. Registration is requested at info(at)miesvanderrohehaus.de.

Saturday, 4 July
Ariane Müller: Monument für Schröderstrasse
Invited by Elisa R. Linn in the context of Public Afterlife
Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery (meeting point: Revolution Monument)
5:00 pm (in German)

Ariane Müller will speak about her work Monument für Schröderstrasse (2005), which addresses the social and spatial practices that emerged in the post-socialist ruins after 1989 and have since disappeared through redevelopment and gentrification. Referring to Schröderstrasse, a temporary artist-run space in East Berlin that could no longer exist, Müller's work, which recreates elements of it inside a museum, transforms the logic of the commemorative monument itself by turning interior and exterior inside out. Its multiple doors and reconstructed environment suggest both the openness of self-organized spaces and the paradox of preserving them within a museum. How can (counter-)monuments, understood not merely as objects but as practices, sustain political utopias and enact the right to the city as a mode of co-producing urban space?

Free of charge. Registration is requested at info(at)miesvanderrohehaus.de.
 

Sunday, 5 July
Guided Tour of Mies van der Rohe’s Revolution Monument
Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery (meeting point: main entrance)
1:00 pm (in German)

Free of charge. Registration is requested at info(at)miesvanderrohehaus.de.
 

Saturday, 11 July
Practical Workshop on Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium
with Prof. Dr. Marcin Zych, botanist, University of Warsaw
Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery (meeting point: Revolution Monument)
12:00–2:00 pm (in English)

Rosa Luxemburg’s rediscovered herbarium offers an unusual perspective on her lifelong interest in plants and the observation of nature. As both a scientific collection and a personal archive, it points to a cultural practice that has preserved and transmitted knowledge about the plant world for centuries. Together with botanist Prof. Dr. Marcin Zych, participants will follow Rosa Luxemburg’s practice of herbarium-making, from collecting and preparing plants to the documentation of herbarium specimens.

Free of charge. Registration is requested at info(at)miesvanderrohehaus.de.

Saturday, 11 July
John Miller: Public Art and The Law of Unintended Consequences
Invited by Elisa R. Linn in the context of Public Afterlife
Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery (meeting point: Revolution Monument)
5:00 pm (in English)

John Miller presents his lecture Public Art and the Law of Unintended Consequences, exploring public space as something contested rather than given. Tracing the unforeseen repercussions that emerge when artworks are confronted with everyday urban life, he examines how they take on lives of their own: becoming monuments, controversies, myths, or sites of collective memory, while acquiring commemorative, symbolic, and historical functions. Here, Miller considers how their meanings and effects can exceed, distort, or even contradict their creators’ intentions. What remains of public artworks after their political, material, or symbolic disappearance? And how do they continue to resonate through memory, loss, and historical change?

Free of charge. Registration is requested at info(at)miesvanderrohehaus.de.
 

Sunday, 12 July
Icon of Modernism: 100 Years Since the Inauguration of the Revolution Monument
Guided tour with Prof. Dr. Jürgen Hofmann
Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery (meeting point: main entrance)
2:00 pm (in German)

Free of charge; donations are welcome. No registration required.

Curator: Dennis Brzek
Curatorial Assistant: Alina Rapp
Project Manager and Architect: Diogo D.C. Vale
Project Advisor: Jörg Adam

With thanks to the Lichtenberg District Cultural Fund, the Berlin Senate Department for Economic Affairs, Energy and Public Enterprises, the Förderkreis Erinnerungsstätte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung Berlin-Friedrichsfelde e.V., the Roads and Parks Department of the Lichtenberg District Office, the administration of Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery, and Andrea Contursi.