FELIX ACKERMANN (WARSAW): FROM NKVD TO NETFLIX. DISCUSSIONS ABOUT HERITAGE PROTECTION CONCERNING THE LUKIŠKĖS-PRISON IN THE CAPITAL OF LITHUANIA, VILNIUS

One of the main characters in the new season of Stranger Things on Netflix is going to be the historic prison in the city center of Vilnius. Despite its troubled past, in today’s Lithuania it is seen as the core of the start into a smart city of the future. Creative industries, artistic movements, business and public remembrance are going to be combined here.

In his lecture Felix Ackermann reflects on how he explored the prison’s past and present from 2014 to 2019 as a public, urban space during the means of applied cultural studies. The shut-down of the building as a prison in 2017 was crucial for the following debates about possibilities for its future use. On the one hand, the historic anthropologist Ackermann fed research results into the debate, on the other hand, he became a protagonist himself on the question how to deal with more recent remembrance histories like prisoners’ graffitis.

The Russian prison in the East of Vilnius had been built as a figurehead of the tsardom in historic Lithuania in 1904. The two-time German occupants as well as the Polish, Soviet and Lithuanian legal authorities used it to isolate their political opponents. It is a place of the holocaust and the prosecution of Polish and Lithuanian inhabitants of Vilnius as well as a site where death sentences had been carried out until 1993.

Dr. Felix Ackermann explores the history of incarceration in partitioned Poland and Lithuania as a research associate at the German Historical Institute Warsaw. From 2011 to 2016, he taught as a DAAD visiting associate professor at the European Humanities University in Vilnius. During that time he started to do research on the history of the Lukiškės prison. About his work at EHU he wrote the book “Mein litauischer Führerschein” which was published by German publisher Suhrkamp in 2017. Within the context of his work at the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism together with colleagues he published “Mapping Vilnius” and “Mapping Visaginas” through the art academy’s publisher in Vilnius. From 2001 to 2011 he established the Institute for Applied History at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder).

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar

Due to the pandemic restrictions the lecture will take place as a video conference (Zoom):
https://tu-berlin.zoom.us/j/67459970613?pwd=RFNKY3N0UmJzUmdLMnVxV0x5TG5hZz09
Meeting-ID: 674 5997 0613
Kenncode: 575515
Telefoneinwahl: 496971049922