Potsdam remembers landmark 1945 conference
IN many ways, Potsdam is Berlin’s counterpart to Versailles in Paris.
In tourist terms, it’s a popular day trip for visitors in Germany, who head out of Berlin by train to see Potsdam’s castles, parks and galleries, as well as the historic bridge across which the Soviet Union and the West traded captured spies.
In historic terms, Potsdam is, like Versailles, the place where plans for peace were laid out after a World War, where the main allied leaders from the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain met in the aftermath of the Second World War.
From July 17 to August 2, 1945, Joseph Stalin, Harry Truman and Winston Churchill negotiated the territorial and political reorganisation of the world in Potsdam’s Cecilienhof Palace.
This year, 75 years later, the palace reopened on June 23 after a lengthy closure during a strict lockdown in Germany.
Marking the anniversary will be a new exhibition called “Potsdam Conference 1945 – Shaping the World,” the Foundation of Prussian Palaces and Gardens Berlinbrandenburg (SPSG) announced.
The show traces the “fateful days in the summer of 1945” and depicts the decisions of Churchill, Truman and Stalin alongside “history’s countless ‘nameless’ – including victims of atom bombs, displaced persons and collaborators.”
Among the diary entries, footage, contemporary documents and loans from Germany and abroad in the exhibition will also be the garden terrace where the famous photos were snapped of the “Big Three” in wicker chairs.
The exhibition’s original opening date of May 1 had to be postponed due to the pandemic. Visitors will be required to wear a face mask and are advised to book advance tickets online due to limited visitor capacity amid the coronavirus outbreak.
Studded with landmarks built between 1730 and 1916, Potsdam is home to architectural and artistic masterpieces by the most important architects and landscape gardeners of their time.
The best-known of these is the Sanssouci Palace, also home to Germany’s oldest gallery and the prized Caravaggio painting “Doubting Thomas”.