Unesco adds Trade Union School in Bernau to UNESCO’s World Heritage List

On 9th July the World Heritage Committeee in Krakow decided: from now on the Trade Union School in Bernau, impressive document of the Bauhaus movement and its architecture, belongs to UNESCO’s World Heritage (Unesco, July 9, 2017).

In 2014 the Catalan artist Eduard Bigas stayed in Bernau to catch the “genus loci”, the spirit of the place of this peculiar building.

“My feelings there were very harsh. Never before had I felt this isolated and alone with my work … I hardly left my room. These ten days seemed to be endless. The forest in front of my window was my only connection with the outside world.” When the artist took a bath alone in the old tub in the abandoned building, he felt intimidated by the place’s history: in May 1933 the Nazis took the school over and used it as a training center for members of SS and Gestapo, in World War II it served as a military meeting and planing center. Suddenly the sound of the splashes of the bathwater that is gradually cooling down is accompanied by the melancholic sound of a dark past echoing through the room. It was these impressions that led to, among others, the two drawings Mortal ut plurimum and Arbeit.