Detention at the university by Olliventure

There is no picture hanging above this lecture theatre, there is a promise: Detention until socialism is in place.

Rows and rows of students, dressed as if for the FDJ parade, look ahead with concentration, as if they have just been told that thinking is allowed, but that it must be done in line with the party line. Learning for the fatherland is the order of the day, diligently, seriously and without that Western nonsense called irony.

And Honecker hovers above it all, smiling like someone who knows full well that detention is not a punishment, but an opportunity to improve one's character.

The values of the GDR are dripping off the wall like ideological plaster: discipline instead of discussion, collective instead of coffee break. The picture is clear: knowledge makes you free - but only within the framework of the authorised learning objectives. Satire? No, of course not. This is serious educational aesthetics with a slight flavour of chalk, a sense of duty and collective sitting.

Today, the "Wilhelm Pieck" youth academy at Bogensee is an abandoned place, bubbling over with history. The complex was extended several times in the socialist-classical style and had one of the largest simultaneous interpreting systems in the GDR to translate teaching content into many languages. After 1990, the site fell to the state of Berlin, lost its function and today stands largely empty or in disrepair - a relic of GDR education policy with controversial historical significance.