Monuments, Voids and Voices #9 Berlin’s Memories of Poland

Authors: Aelig Le Guennec & Maia Vincent

This audiowalk guides listeners through the Monument to the Polish Soldiers and German Anti-Fascists in Berlin Volkspark Friedrichshain, using movement and multilingual narration to explore how monuments represent memory, identity, and politics. Beginning with ambient sound—Polish jazz fading into background and the quiet of a winter park—the walk situates the listener physically and historically, inviting them to approach the monument as a lived and contested site. As participants move around the sculpture, environmental sounds such as skateboarding and crows display the monument's integration into everyday urban life.

Erected in 1972 under the GDR by a German-Polish artists' collective, the monument symbolized socialist solidarity and a shared anti-fascist struggle during World War II. The audiowalk critically reflects on how this official narrative shaped a selective memoryscape, one that marginalized more complex, conflicting, or marginalized perspectives. By drawing attention to the monument's original dedication and its lingering presence under a changed political context, the work questions how historical meaning is preserved, overwritten, or forgotten.

The soundwalk further expands the site's significance by recounting a 2020 protest by a Berlin-based Polish queer feminist collective, who used the monument as a space of contemporary resistance against nationalism. This intervention reframed the inscription "For our and your freedom," thereby connecting past and present struggles and challenging which histories are publicly recognized.

By situating this monument within broader debates around Polish memorialization in Berlin—including recent controversies surrounding proposed and temporary memorials—the audiowalk invites listeners to reflect on representation, visibility, and belonging. Ultimately, it asks whether monuments can hold multiple perspectives at once, and whether listeners themselves feel represented within these spaces of memory.