Talk:Soviet War Memorial (Treptower Park)

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[edit] infiltration

i infiltrated (urban exploration) a part of the memorial (under the "flags"). i've taken photos...it is pretty interesting, i think it is mostly just for maintenance of the memorial, though. if this might be of any use to the article, post in reply here and ill set up a way to see the photos...

[edit] Names of the two memorials

I've moved the monument to its own article (Soviet War Memorial, Berlin) and expanded it, but this now raises the question of what we should call the yet-unwritten article about the Tiergarten monument. I've provisionally added links to Soviet Memorial, Berlin-Tiergarten, but realize that this pairing might not be ideal. There seems to be little consistency on the use of names of either, so we might want to move them both to Soviet War Memorial, Berlin-Treptow and Soviet War Memorial, Berlin-Tiergarten or a similar parallel formulation.

The Memorial to Polish Soldiers and German Anti-Fascists, Berlin might also want a less verbose title, but I have to finish writing it first.

 ProhibitOnions  (T) 11:15, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

in de.wp the articles are named de:Sowjetisches Ehrenmal (Tiergarten), de:Sowjetisches Ehrenmal (Treptower Park) and (not yet existing) de:Sowjetisches Ehrenmal (Schönholzer Heide) (but there is already an image: commons:Image:Berlin Ehrenmal Schoenholz.JPG). In Commons there is also a gallery for the Tiergarten memorial: commons:Sowjetisches Ehrenmal (Tiergarten). greetings. --BLueFiSH ✉ 18:06, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
Yep, we might want to follow this precedent, although perhaps retaining the "Berlin" in the title as well. I think "Berlin-Schönholz" might do just as well without the "Heide", that's how I've heard it described, and an article about it would be good (I walked past it an hour ago, I should have taken pictures) though the other two I mentioned are more pressing. I might write the Polish memorial article tonight, as I took some pictures a couple of days ago.  ProhibitOnions  (T) 18:47, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Tomb of the unknown rapist

Women of the (East) German wartime generation still refer to it as the "tomb of the unknown rapist" due to the mass rapes by Red Army soldiers in the years following 1945.[1] [2][3]

Now obviously the text is referenced, see for example the end of this article

Therefore I'm a bit alarmed to see a number of IP addresses deleting that information using various motives such as: "It doesn't matter how someone calls a monument to a child savior. Place this info elsewhere"

Now to this latest deletion by Beatle Fab Four (talk · contribs), after my request for an explanation at talk. The edit summary was: [1] "You may have problems. It was discussed and explained long before". I have two issues with this. 1. Please be civil. 2. I can not see the issue discussed anywhere, except as the edit summary of the anonymous included above. It is fairly WP:Notability that a monument is called "Tomb of the unknown rapist. To want to remove that information you have to do more than simply delete with some vague referal to "discussed and explained long before". Discussed where?--Stor stark7 Talk 17:07, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

You probably don't get a point why this monument stands in the Treptower Park. It is dedicated exactly to soldiers who managed to keep humanity instead of revenge for what German Nazis did in the Soviet Union . Look, the soldier holds a child who he just saved. Placing such an info disgraces the memory, I dare to say, of these holy people. Beatle Fab Four (talk) 20:06, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Beatle. This is outrageous. Please go Washington Monument article and add its characterization as a "patently phallic structure" referenced to The Economist (see [2]). Then please let us know how it went. And note that that is the monument to a politician, no doubt a positive figure, but still politicians are routinely mocked. This here is a monument of a different kind. All German people I met, and I met many, understand the difference. I hope Wikipedia editors would draw some conclusions. Thanks, --Irpen 08:10, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

This is obviously an emotional subject for some. You would have done better by challenging the source, which is the only possible weak point in the inclusion of the sentence, and not some emotional appeal to saintly soldiers.
May I humbly request that we ask for a third opinion, preferably from someone not connected to editing central or Eastern Europe topics?
For the sake of clarity I would like to also answer your post, Irpen. There is a huge difference between a newspaper giving a national monument a derogatory name, and having the entire female population of an occupied nation giving a derogatory name to a monument erected by conquerors and occupiers. So, we have here an alleged "child-saver" monument erected to give tribute to the Russian army. To explain why the population who have to live with this document gave it a derogatory name is easy to understand:
[3]Sadly, it was the weak and defenseless, the villagers and townspeople of Eastern Germany, who first felt the impact of the Soviet army. Pumped up with Zhukov's rhetoric, Soviet soldiers unleashed a campaign of terror in the Eastern German lands of Pomerania, Silesia, and East Prussia that was barbaric even by the standards of an already ghastly war. Not only were Germans abused, terrorized, and driven off their land, but they were murdered in large numbers, and women in particular were made into targets of abuse. German women were raped in unimaginable numbers, then often killed or left to die from their wounds. Some women's bodies were found raped, mutilated, and nailed to barn doors. Hundreds of thousands of women have given testimony to the rapes they endured at the hands of the Russians; historian Norman Naimark has estimated that as many as 2 million may have been sexually assaulted. Worse, most women were victims of repeated rapings; some were raped as many as sixty to seventy times.
[4]In any case, just as each rape survivor carried the effects of the crime with ther until the end of her life, so was the collective anguish nearly unbearable. The social psychology of women and men in the soviet zone of occupation was marked by the crime of rape from the first days of occupation, through the founding of the GDR in the fall of 1949, until - one could argue - the present. The German women's fear of russians and the association of Soviet troops with rape and looting became the central [East] German argument against closer ties with the Soviet Union.
Based on that I see very clearly why a Soviet monument giving tribute to Soviet troops would have acquired a widely used derogatory nickname. I think the German nickname of the monument placed in Germany is notable enough to be included, despite the risk of offending the sensibilities of some people living in a country far away from the monument. However, I don't intend to risk getting sucked into an edit cold-war with "anonymous" editors and others, so I suggest we ask for a balanced review from hopefully neutral, non central/eastern Europe related, sources.--Stor stark7 Speak 13:32, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
Please note that something being "referenced" does not warrant the automatic inclusion left and right. Material should not just be referenced, but covered properly. Proper coverage means, among other things, correct choice of articles and avoidance of forking. This has nothing to do with "offending sensibilities" but with maintaining the articles encyclopedic.
I don't see why you brought up the refs above from elsewhere. Soviet atrocities are covered in various article of wikipedia. Some users you know well inject the material indiscriminately in articles left and right. There are bunch of "Soviet occupation", "Soviet repression", etc. forks where the same material gets repeatedly pasted by users into existing articles where it is off-topic or through creation of new fork-articles under POVed titles. Your references to Soviet atrocities above may be related to the articles on such topics. What did you want to prove by using them at the talk page of this article? That Soviets did bad things? We know that and this is not the subject of this discussion. We are talking here about the propriety of adding some questionable stuff into an article about the monument.
I gave you an example of the material being referenced but deemed unsuited for the inclusion in the particular article about an architectulal subject. Phallic references to the Washington monument are very common. We do not include them into there. This here is the exact same situation.
I always welcome asking for more feedback but please avoid some general remarks that are easy to perceive as dismissive to the group of editors because of their ethnic and cultural background. Before this discussion gets an infusion of some users who follow me around, let's resolve this amicably and use some common sense. --Irpen 19:29, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
I agree that we should resolve this amicably. Let me respond to you topic by topic.
  1. Why did I include the quotes and references to the Soviet troops behavior here at the talk page? Mainly due to the editor who received your support. In particular due to his motivation that "Placing such an info disgraces the memory, I dare to say, of these holy people.". I felt it was necessary to point out that that opinion rimes badly with what scholars think of the those people. Maybe there were some that did nothing bad, and even did good. But the monument symbolizes the whole group, and on average the group did extremely despicable things.
  2. Yes, I've gotten to know the certain people you refer to very well, and perhaps I overdid it a bit with the quotes here on the talk page. I've actually started contemplating whether their behavior might not actually have started rubbing off on me, and others, which is a very scary thought. They really should have been permanently blocked a long time ago.
  3. I don't see that the comparison you make to the apparent phallic symbolism of the Washington monument is relevant. It is so obvious from the shape that it would add very little value to the reader to know that others have made the connection. To be able to look up which monument the locals in Berlin are referring to when they mention the "tomb of the unknown rapist", on the other hand, is very encyclopedic in my opinion.
  4. I did a little digging, after my remark on the weakness of the references, and I believe you are right that it should not be included in this article. But not for the reasons you state. The reason is simply that I've come to the conclusion that for now the sources can only with certainty be used to include the name in relation to the much smaller monument with its tombs, in the center of Berlin: Soviet War Memorial (Tiergarten). see these references: [5], [6]. Apparently Beevor, who is the source for the second link, also refers to the monument in the center of the city, i.e Tiergarten.
  5. I hope as you say we can resolve this amicably before the "traveling circus" that seems to be following both of use around , in my case only one since two years or so and in the last few months frequently closely assisted by a second more eloquent one, arrives here. I propose that the alternative name be reinstated in the Tiergarten article, and dropped as not reliably enough referenced in this article. I hope that solution should also be good enough for "Beatle Fab Four" since the Tiergarten monument seems unrelated to any child-savers. --Stor stark7 Speak 21:45, 14 April 2008 (UTC)