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Granite head of Lenin stays unexcavated, Berlin senate says

An East Berlin statue of Lenin was broken up and buried with the fall of Communism in 1991.

By Ed Adamczyk

BERLIN, Aug. 21 (UPI) -- The head of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, as represented in over three tons of granite, will not be exhumed for an exhibition of Berlin monuments, curators learned.

The head, over five feet high, was part of a massive 19-meter (62 feet) sculpture of Lenin that stood in East Berlin from 1970 until it was dismantled in 1991 with the downfall of Communism. Curators of an upcoming show of Berlin monuments hoped to have the head in the display.

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The sculpture was cut into 129 pieces, but the head remained intact. An iconic photo from 1991 shows the head lifted by a crane, a metaphor for the undoing of the Communist ideology. The pieces, and the head, were buried in a pit in Kopenick, a town now in southwest Berlin.

The Berlin senate rejected the curators' plea to excavate Lenin's head, citing the cost of the project, the destruction of trees and shrubbery now atop the pit and no knowledge of precisely where to dig, although exhibit curator Andrea Theissen claims to have a map showing the head's location.

"The Lenin statue is an important document to show how a united Germany has dealt with the history of the GDR (German Democratic Republic, also known as East Germany)," she told the British newspaper the Guardian.

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Historians and politicians were critical of the decision to let Lenin rest, suggesting it was driven by ideology, left-wing Parliament member Wolfgang Brauer telling the German newspaper Taz, "They are even still scared of that stupid old head."

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