Demolition on Karl Marx Square

Communist East Germany’s demolition of Leipzig’s intact medieval University Church in May 1968 was an act widely decried as “cultural barbarism”. Although overshadowed by the crackdown on Prague Spring mere weeks later, the willful destruction of this historic landmark on a central site called Karl Marx Square represents an essential turning point in relations between the Communist authorities and the “people” they claimed to serve. As the largest case of East German protest between the 1953 Uprising and 1989 Revolution, this intimate local trauma exhibits how the inner workings of a “dictatorial” system operated more broadly and exposes the often gray and overlapping lines between State and citizenry. Through deep analysis of untapped periodicals and archives, it introduces a broad cast of characters who helped make the demolition possible and restores the voices of ordinary citizens who dared in the name of culture, humanism, and civic pride to protest what they saw as an inconceivable tragedy. In this city that later started the 1989 Revolution triggering the fall of the Berlin Wall, residents from every social background desperately hoped to convince their leaders to step back from the brink. But as the dust cleared in 1968, they saw with all finality that their voices meant nothing, that the DDR was a sham democracy awash with utopian rhetoric that had no connection with their everyday lives. If Communism died in Prague in 1968, it had already died in Leipzig just weeks before, with repercussions that still haunt today’s politics of memory.