On the western edges of Berlin is a place more people should know about. At Spandau Citadel – itself worth seeing as one of the oldest buildings in the German capital – there is a warehouse full of statues that were once deemed too dangerous or obsolete to be viewed by visitors or locals. Vistors are invited to wander from Teutonic knights to Hitler’s horses and Lenin’s head, an experience that feels like a fascinating rummage in the dustbin of history.
On Sunday, I visited Unveiled. Berlin and its Monuments at the Spandau Citadel as the finale of my guided tour through Prussian Berlin. It’s a quietly radical exhibition that forces us to reckon with the physical remains of ideologies Germany has long tried to bury. Often in a very literal sense. Many of the statues on display were not just toppled at some point but also buried in the ground, some in remote areas of Berlin, so that their history and the often painful memories associated with it might be forgotten.
Inside the citadel’s massive stone walls is an unassuming depot building. As we stepped out of the sunshine and into the tall-ceilinged brick warehouse, I heard hushed “wow”s and “oh”s from the group. I felt the same sense of astonishment. The exhibition gathers together discarded statues and toppled symbols: fragments of Prussian grandeur, fascist nudity, socialist idealism. Walking through its hushed halls feels like strolling through a graveyard, or perhaps an archaeological dig, where uncomfortable truths have begun to resurface.
As the title, Unveiled, suggests, visitors walk among things that had once been concealed and were now brought to light. The exhibition doesn’t just show the monuments, but it also outlines the act of burial and recovery.
A striking example of this is the massive head of Lenin that once towered over Friedrichshain. It weighs 3.8 tonnes and is made from solid Ukrainian granite. It once sat atop a statue that was 19 metres tall and wouldn’t have fitted into the depot in one piece.
After reunification, the statue was dismantled, cut into pieces and buried in a sandpit on the outskirts of Berlin. The idea was that it would never see the light of day again. Yet, here it was: excavated, cracked, displayed, empty eyes staring out at visitors. But Lenin is not displayed as a tribute. His head remains severed and “toppled”, deliberately displayed lying down sideways. Its display is a question: what do we do with these symbols of discredited regimes? Do we destroy them? Do we hide them? Or do we look at them and try to understand?
Unveiled holds no illusions about neutrality. It makes it clear that its exhibits are more than old stones. These are contested objects, tied to blood, ideology, power, and war. The exhibition includes parts of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s “Siegesallee” or “Victory Avenue” lined with statues glorifying Prussian kings and warriors. Once a proud nationalist project, it was ridiculed as vainglorious even in its own time, and later removed by the Allies after the war. Nearby stands a decathlete by Arno Breker, Hitler’s favourite sculptor, his athleticism now haunted by the knowledge of what it once represented: the Aryan ideal.
To walk through Unveiled is to move through layers of history, layers modern-day Germany wants to leave behind. Prussia. Imperial Germany. The Nazi Reich. East German socialism. Each regime had its own heroes, its own aesthetics, its own myths. And each, in time, attempted to overwrite the symbols of the one before. But the past does not stay buried. It erodes, reappears, insists on being seen. I found the exhibition a powerful symbol of that.
This is particularly true in Germany, where history has not only been made but also consciously unmade, through denazification, monument removals, street renamings, and restorations and rebuilding. And yet, this very effort at erasure creates new challenges.
Removing a statue does not remove the past. Sometimes it only displaces it. What does it mean, for instance, to store Hitler’s busts in a depot? A giant bronze horse that had once adorned his chancellery would probably still be in the hands of the private collector who had bought it if the German government hadn’t pushed to acquire it. Would that have mattered? If so, why? Ditto Lenin’s head, which would still be in the ground, hidden from the public eye.
Unveiled doesn’t provide answers to these complex questions, but it prompts you to think. It doesn’t rehabilitate these figures, nor does it call for iconoclasm. Instead, it makes space for ambiguity. For reflection. For discomfort. By pulling these monuments out of the rubble and presenting them not on pedestals, but on cold cement floors where visitors can see and touch them, they become not symbols of glory, but objects of inquiry. They are stripped of their certainty. And in that vulnerability, something honest emerges.
What I took away most powerfully is the idea that a monument is never just about the person or event it depicts. It is also about who decides to remember and how and why. Germany’s history is marked by abrupt breaks and ideological shifts, and its monuments bear the scars of those changes. Bullet holes, broken arms, missing heads and noses. These are not just damages, they are evidence of historical reckoning, vandalism, anger and angst.
Unveiled is not about closure. It’s about exposure. It’s about confronting the reality that history cannot be curated into a clean narrative. That memory, like stone, can be shattered but also reassembled. And that sometimes, the most important monuments are not the ones standing in public squares, but the ones buried, then unearthed, and made to speak again.