After a good 2 ½ years of construction, the visitor center at the Brecht-Weigel House in Buckow could be ceremoniously opened today. District Administrator Gernot Schmidt and Brandenburg's Secretary of State for Culture Tobias Dünow opened the new visitor center together with many guests.
Landrat Gernot Schmidt explains:
"A long road has been completed and our Brecht Weigel House enters a new quality of its work. For the cultural landscape of our region, this expansion is a great enrichment. To fill this house with life from today will be a pleasure for us."
State Secretary for Culture Tobias Dünow:
"The opening of the visitor pavilion at the Brecht-Weigel House was actually planned much earlier - but fits perfectly: not only because of the 125th birthday of Bertolt Brecht. Also because almost exactly 70 years ago to the day, the workers in the GDR took to the streets. We know: The revolution failed. But what only a few know: In Buckow, Brecht wrote his Elegies a short time later - not innocuous nature poetry, but also a partly highly political examination of the conditions in the GDR. Helene Weigel and Bertolt Brecht made Buckow a place of world literature. It is therefore only fitting that the Brecht-Weigel House is one of the most important literary memorials and probably the most authentic literary museum in our country. With the new visitor center, we are creating more space at the authentic site with its studio house, artists' garden and boathouse. And thus more space for Bertolt Brecht - and for visitors, for special exhibitions, for cultural education projects, for encounters."
Background: The museum store and visitor reception as well as staff offices, an archive room, an event room and barrier-free sanitary facilities are located in the visitor center.
The previously unsolvable conflict of event activity and limited space in the original furnished living hall with historical museum property is completely solved. The multifunctional hall in the visitor center offers both spatially and technically the possibility to present temporary and traveling exhibitions, as well as to hold group meetings, film screenings and other cultural events regardless of the weather within the museum premises.
For the implementation, the district has received funding from the EU, the federal government and the state of Brandenburg.