Renau and the Halle-Neustadt Mural Project in East Germany
In 1958, Josep Renau stepped into East Berlin with a fierce commitment to the socialist cause that defined his life. Fluent in neither German nor the local sensibilities, the Valencian artist had fled Spain in 1939, spent years in exile in Mexico, and then moved on to East Germany to translate his artistic and propagandistic talents into a public program. His mission was straightforward: to contribute to the state’s cultural landscape with imagery capable of educating, uniting, and mobilizing workers toward a shared tomorrow.
The early years in the German Democratic Republic saw Renau exploring animated film and poster design for television, but his trajectory soon bent toward painting and large-scale murals. He drew inspiration from Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, whose practice sought to embed political messages in public spaces and elevate muralism as a national mode of expression.
By 1967, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany commissioned Renau to shape the artistic concept for a new residential project tied to Halle-Neustadt. This planned community aimed to house workers in the chemical industry while prioritizing education and culture for students. The ambition laid the groundwork for a bold visual program that would narrate a collective journey toward socialism and, eventually, communism.
The initial plan envisioned two vertical murals, each 35 meters tall and 7 meters wide, positioned on the stair pediments of the residence. Renau urged expanding the project across the entire building, creating a five-area panoramic sequence guiding viewers toward socialist ideals and beyond into a communist horizon. Early drafts suggested a mural length nearing 1.5 kilometers, a scale unusual for public art in the GDR. Neither Renau nor his colleagues had encountered such a monumental public artwork in East Germany before this project began.
By 1968 Renau collaborated with four other German artists, but internal disagreements led to a split, leaving Valencia to proceed largely solo. He pressed forward and completed three of the five murals: the two vertical walls framing the project and a sweeping horizontal mural that stretched across the building’s lower facade. That horizontal piece became the installation’s centerpiece and pushed the artist’s ambition to its outer limits.
one million euros
This central mosaic, titled Youth’s Walk into the Future, was removed years later in the mid-1990s without maintenance or repair. The two vertical murals survived, while the large horizontal mural faced a precarious fate. In collaboration with Siqueiros, Renau fused Mexican techniques with cubism, futurism, and surrealist tendencies to craft a distinctive visual language for Halle-Neustadt.
One of the two large works, The Forces of Nature and Human-Controlled Technology, was restored in 2005 by the Halle City Council. The other, Unity of the Working Class and the Founding of East Germany, followed a similar path as the dismantled horizontal mural and endured a steady decline. The Wüstenrot Foundation stepped in with a substantial commitment, providing a plan that mobilized one million euros to secure the project’s future. This support proved crucial in preserving a meaningful fragment of the DDR’s cultural memory for the local community.
The mural comprises 10,904 ceramic pieces chosen for resilience in an industrial city’s polluted environment. The work blends serial construction with hand-finished majolica enamel, letting each tile contribute to the overall rhythm. Symbols such as a corncob, a microscope, and organ pipes represent nature and agriculture, science and technology, and the fine arts. A handshake near the bottom signals the end of a division among workers, while a prominent Marx portrait at the top anchors the political message within the composition.
The design was meant to be legible to passersby. Renau studied pedestrian flow, sightlines, and how distant and close views alter perception. Through careful color, form, and planning, the murals offer a dynamic, almost living visual experience: at first glance largely abstract, the scenes reveal more detail as viewers approach.
Plate number 10,904
In 1974, three murals found homes at the Halle-Neustadt education center, within a room of the Regierungskrankenhaus, the hospital associated with the political elite in East Berlin. Signs of movement and security concerns appeared early, as plaster and ceramic plates loosened and cracks emerged. By 2021 the Wüstenrot Foundation initiated a comprehensive restoration plan, cataloging the 232 rows of ceramic plates. When restoration resumed in May 2022, problems intensified above Marx’s head, prompting cautious stabilization and careful reattachment work.
To guide conservation, every one of the 10,904 tiles was numbered and mapped, with damaged zones temporarily reinforced. Restorers reported that roughly 6,000 tiles had lost adhesion, and about a thousand would need removal and reinstallation. In the upper section, around 500 tiles were damaged beyond simple repair and would require re-creation. Researchers anticipate completing the study by year’s end. The work stands not only as art but as a discussion about managing the cultural heritage of the DDR, a matter of national identity as much as historical memory.
The IVAM exhibition Exiles of Renau showcased his models and sketches for Halle-Neustadt (1964), reflecting a DDR plan to rebuild cities devastated by war. The designs drew on Bauhaus principles and modern architecture to improve living conditions for industrial workers. Yet the exhibit also reminded visitors that ambitious experiments can falter, and not all visions survive the test of time. Of the five proposed murals, Renau delivered three: Man’s Domination of Nature, The March of the Youth to the Future, and The Unity of the Working Class and the Establishment of East Germany. The other concepts remained unrealized, cut short by political and logistical realities of the era.