Pasewalk (dpa/mv) – In the city of Pasewalk (West Pomerania-Greifswald), the renaming of a park from “Leninhain” to “Peace Park” is being discussed. The reason for this is an application by the left-wing city faction, as a city spokeswoman said on Thursday. The application was approved by a majority in the main committee, but was referred to committees again for further discussion at the city representative meeting on Wednesday evening. Among other things, the State Office for the Preservation of Monuments should be included in the decision.
The parliamentary group justified the application by saying that in the park not far from the city wall there are “several objects that are related to the topic of peace”. “The issue of peace is more relevant than ever,” said a spokesman. These include a “Soviet memorial” with the graves of fallen Red Army soldiers, the “Rubble Ball” created by a Canadian artist after 1990, a peace stele and a memorial for a Jewish businessman from Pasewalk. Therefore, the park should be renamed “Peace Park” or “Peace Grove”.
The “memorial” should not be called into question, it said. It could continue to be called “Leninhain” in the vernacular. The Soviet Cemetery of Honor was redesigned in 1970 on the occasion of the 100th birthday of the communist Vladimir Iljitisch Lenin (1870-1924). In the state list of monuments it is named under “Gedenkstätte Haussmannstraße”. By the end of the war in 1945, the center of Pasewalk had been 80 percent destroyed.
According to the State Office for the Preservation of Monuments, it is currently not uncommon, although rare, for such renaming requests to appear. In Schwerin, for example, the Lenin monument was recently questioned again by citizens.
