De Pastores, Diablos y Ursulinos La Pastorela de los Osos.

The first phase comprises more than a decade. After the wall came down in 1989, the juridical status of the female inmates at Hoheneck was turned upside down. Arrested and held captive due to anti-socialist agitation and attempted defection, as it were, the women at Hoheneck and other politically persecuted GDR citizens became the focus of government attempts to compensate and rehabilitate the victims of communist injustice. With the Erste and Zweite SED-

Unrechtsbereinigungsgesetz (First and Second Law for the Rehabilitation of SED-Victims), the

126 political prisoners of Hoheneck received amnesty. Left at the site were those inmates who had been detained for non-political reasons. Accordingly, the number of inmates for which the prison was originally designed could no longer be maintained. In 1990, the prison fell under the jurisdiction of Saxony’s Justice Department. The grassroots initiative Frauenkreis der

ehemaligen Hoheneckerinnen e.V. was founded only 16 months later, on April 26, 1991. It

consisted of over 1,500 members. Like so many other activist groups, grassroots initiatives, and victims’ associations throughout the former GDR, the Frauenkreis vowed to “preserve the memory of the most well-known and notorious prison for women of the GDR” (Latotzky). However, in contrast to the developments at the memorial site Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, their appeal to close the prison facility and slowly convert it into a memorial site remained unanswered. Quite to the contrary, a department for male inmates was erected at Hoheneck and comprehensive reconstruction measures were taken in 1994. Until 2001, Hoheneck was listed as federal prison facility nr. 30461 Stollberg (Hoheneck), when Saxony’s Ministry of the Interior closed the detention center. The remaining forty-four inmates were transferred to modern regional prisons. Until its final closure, only a memorial stone close to the facility reminded in

Stollberg’s former mayor Matthias Wirth, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, and the Frauenkreis

e.V. on October 28, 1991 (Kaminsky, Orte 371).

The decision to close the prison facility was not triggered by growing pressure from the former victims to honor their suffering at Hoheneck prison. Nor did it result from increasing public and official efforts to preserve remnants of the former SED-regime. Dr. Clemens Heitmann, the Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der

ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Federal Commissioner for the Records of the

State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic) reflects in his article “Zu jeder Zeit ein Skandal - Über die Vergangenheit und Zukunft des DDR Frauengefängnisses Hoheneck” about the past and the future of the scandal-ridden prison. He indicates that the rationale behind its final closure was its deficient standard as a modern prison facility. Considering the claim, we must ask critically: why does the federal commissioner for the Stasi files, Heitmann, not mention in a single word that the time might have finally come to endorse the public endeavor to remember the facility as a site of false imprisonment, unjust suffering, and political oppression? This is not at all in line with the agency’s mission to “teach the public about the structure, methods and effects of the Ministry for State Security [and to] cultivate critical public discourse about totalitarian ideas and structures by contributing publicly to the questions of coming to terms with the past” (Heitmann). While reflecting upon Hoheneck’s troublesome history, Heitmann draws on a historic strategy of attacking the Soviet Occupation Force and subsequently the SED-regime for “ruthlessly ignoring the fact” that already the Nazis had used the prison facility - just like the concentration camps Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen - before bing appropriated to incarcerate political opponents of the communist regime. It is striking that after Germany’s reunification, Saxony’s Justice Department, too, turned a blind eye to the site’s

past and continued to operate the prison. As the official statement reads, Hoheneck was closed due to substandard conditions only eleven years later.

Characteristic for this phase is bureaucratic blindness: officials did not recognize Hoheneck as a remnant of great historical importance. On the contrary, Saxony’s Minister of Justice, Steffen Heitmann (conservative Christian Democratic Union Party, the CDU) evaluated the potential of the site as prison as “nicht schlecht” and estimated that twenty million Deutsch Mark would be required for upgrading the facility to (former) West German standards (“Justizvollzugsanstalt Hoheneck wird modernisiert”). Until its final closure, the state invested nine million DM to keep the prison running (Schade)

Bureaucratic blindness entails a blindness vis-à-vis historical significance but also to the contemporary claims posed by individual citizens and organized groups. Unlike the developments at the memorial site Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, the activist group Frauenkreis der

ehemaligen Hoheneckerinnen e.V. was unable to make a strong enough case to draw attention to

the site’s historical significance in the attempt to address the GDR past and ultimately to launch plans for the creation of a memorial site right after Germany’s reunification. Although the federal parliament of united Germany and the five new states in its Eastern part reached “consensus about a public duty to address, and possibly redress, the manifold issues of injustice and repression committed during GDR times,” as the Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung (Foundation for the Reappraisal of the SED-Regime) claims in its 2011 report on “Coming to Terms: Dealing with the Communist Past in United Germany,” the example of Hoheneck prison shows that the German federal government and the parliament have by no means been very clear in expressing the need for a “wide-ranging and intense effort by federal, state and local governments” (12-13) to reappraise the communist past.

In addition to bureaucratic blindness vis-à-vis historical significance, we also witness a tendency in the immediate post-wall years that led the Saxony’s state officials place more emphasis on the practicality of the prison rather than on its commemorative value. During the immediate years after the fall of the wall, the need to restructure and transform the administrative, economic, and juridical sectors of the former East German state and thus to restore existing structures, such as prison facilities, seems to have had priority over the growing demand to preserve these structures to commemorate the former GDR and its abuse of state power. Saxony’s Minister of Justice Heitmann even declared that Saxony’s detention facilities were working to full capacity. A large prison facility like Hoheneck would have thus accommodated for these shortages (“Justizvollzugsanstalt Hoheneck wird modernisiert”). This explains the limited degree of attention that the officials devoted to the site with regards to its historical weight and commemorative value. The continuous use of Hoheneck as a prison facility resulted in a willful forgetting on an official level. On the one hand, the installment of a memorial stone close to the prison was a small, but important, step towards the acknowledgment of the victim’s suffering at Hoheneck and showed that former victims and a small portion of the public continued to preserve the memory of Hoheneck prison. This small commemorative act also assured that the activist groups felt they were being heard. But it also served to placate the plea to close Hoheneck and start deliberations on how to remember the fate of political opponents to the SED-regime.

With the money spent to renovate Hoheneck in the 1990s, probably no one thought that the prison would be up for debate again very soon. But on April 14, 2001, the dpa (German Press Agency) released the news that Saxony’s Justice Department had decided to close the prison after all. According to state officials, the conditions of the facility no longer conformed to

modern standards. The remaining inmates would soon be transferred to the newly expanded prison in Chemnitz (“Frauengefängnis kurz vor der Schließung”).