Qualla: Waldsiedlung

Waldsiedlung: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ViennaUK, CC BY-SA 4.0. The signs on the outer fence said wildlife research area. Five kilometres of wire mesh through the Brandenburg pines, and behind it, in theory, biologists counting deer. What was actually inside was the government of the German Democratic Republic — every member of the Politburo, their families, and the Stasi officers who guarded them, in a compound of about two square kilometres that a stranger could drive past without noticing. Waldsiedlung means forest settlement, which is exactly as much as the name gives away. East Germans called it Wandlitz, after the village down the road, and by the 1980s they had a better name for it: Volvograd.

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Image: ViennaUK | CC BY-SA 4.0

Waldsiedlung: After Budapest

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Mazbln, CC BY-SA 3.0. Until the late 1950s the SED leadership lived in villas on the Majakowskiring in Pankow, well inside East Berlin and close enough to the city that a crowd could reach them. The Hungarian uprising of 1956 changed the calculation. In Budapest, party officials had been dragged into ...

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Image: User:Mazbln | CC BY-SA 3.0

Waldsiedlung: Volvograd

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ranofuchs, CC BY-SA 3.0. The nickname came from the Volvos. The leadership had started out in Soviet Chaika limousines and moved on to Swedish cars, and the joke welded that to Volgograd: Volvograd, the city of the Volvo. It is a sharper piece of mockery than it looks, because the fleet was the point. Al...

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Image: Ranofuchs | CC BY-SA 3.0

Waldsiedlung: Two Rings and Thirty-One Towers

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ranofuchs, CC BY-SA 3.0. The security was arranged in layers so that the outer one looked like nothing. The five-kilometre outer ring was ordinary wire mesh carrying its wildlife research signs; thirty-one watchtowers stood inside it. The inner ring was a two-metre concrete wall painted green, and gettin...

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Image: Ranofuchs | CC BY-SA 3.0

Waldsiedlung: Two Standards of Comparison

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ViennaUK, CC BY-SA 4.0. Photographs of Wandlitz tend to disappoint people who expect a palace. The houses are plain, the furniture is 1960s functional, and next to the home of a Western head of government the whole compound looks distinctly ordinary. That is one measurement, and it is the one the reside...

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Image: ViennaUK | CC BY-SA 4.0

Waldsiedlung: A Thousand Beds

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Angela M. Arnold, Berlin (=44penguins), CC BY-SA 3.0. In late 1989 the residents were told to leave, and they left. The compound they vacated turned out to be the most legible thing the collapsing state had produced: not a policy or a speech, but a fence with an explanation on it. What happened next is almost anticlimactic. The bui...

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Image: Angela M. Arnold, Berlin (=44penguins) | CC BY-SA 3.0