Former Courthouse Lehrter Straße

Former Courthouse Lehrter Straße
Lehrter Straße 60
10557 Berlin

Legality, Illegality, and the Artist’s Claim

This former courthouse—punctured by holes—allows for an investigation of ideas of legality and illegality but opposes this binary with the artist’s claim, and the artist's ability to designate an action, or a readymade as an art-work. The urinal was once claimed as an artwork, but the biennial argues that the act of stopping the secret police from burning files or the act of saving a lake might be the artistic claim of our times.

Working with the history of this bureaucratic building, artists have brought to the surface trials and stories from its time as a Military Detention Centre to make anti-military claims in the language of humor and the absurd. Taking on the orality of a space such as a court, artists propose claims through knotting, walking, reading groups, scientific lectures, and People’s Tribunals to restore meaning, and open channels for dignity.

The exhibition is a technology for expanding and slowing down time for thinking through devastation and violence, in a time when Al accelerates and reduces it. The holes of the building open a sedimentary understanding of the present, offering the experience of quantum time and the transmission of missing fragments of history via silent monuments, and counter monumentality.

History of the building

The former Courthouse Lehrter Straße has been vacant since 2012 and is being made accessible for the first time as a site for contemporary art in Berlin in the context of the 13th Berlin Biennale.

The brick building was completed in 1902 as an extension to the Northern Military Prison on Lehrter Straße and is connected to the prison building at Lehrter Straße 61 by a bridge, which was referred to by prisoners as the “bridge of sighs”, inspired by the Venetian bridge of the same name. 

One of the most famous trials held here was the 1916 trial against Karl Liebknecht. Liebknecht was arrested for taking part in an anti-war demonstration, initially transferred to the adjacent prison, and sentenced to several years of imprisonment. After his release, Liebknecht gave one of his first speeches at Sophiensæle. 

Later, the building complex served as a military training center and, with the reintroduction of military courts by the NSDAP, as a Wehrmacht investigative prison. Bullet holes in the facade suggest that fierce battles between the German Wehrmacht and the Red Army must have taken place here. After the war, the complex was located in West German territory. In 1950, the prison administration moved into the courthouse building, and the adjacent prison was used as a women’s prison until the mid-1980s. Renowned inmates included members of the Red Army Faction. Poor prison conditions, among other factors, resulted in protests, escape attempts, and breakouts, with employees resigning in solidarity. 

The building was last used as a branch of the Tiergarten District Court. In preparation for the 13th Berlin Biennale, the structure of the offices will not be changed. They continue to bear witness of the conditions of justice.

The Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion plans to subsequently develop the building into an artistic production venue for Berlin’s independent art scene.