Who Mows Treptower Park? A State Bound to Maintain Another State’s Dead
The question sounds almost flippant: who mows the lawn at Treptower Park? But the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin’s Treptower Park is not a park in any ordinary sense. It is a military cemetery holding the remains of more than 7,000 Red Army soldiers, a diplomatic object governed by a treaty of reunification, and a heritage ensemble whose upkeep is divided among federal ministries, a Berlin Senate department, a state-owned green-space company, and a district that hosts the site without running it. The mowing is the visible end of a chain of responsibility that is deliberately hard to trace.
This article follows that chain. It asks who is legally bound to maintain the memorial, who pays for it, who actually coordinates the work, and what the arrangement reveals about how the German state holds itself accountable for another state’s dead. The answer is not a single office. It is a layered settlement in which fiscal responsibility has drifted upward to the federal level while operational responsibility remains local, and in which a consultation obligation toward Russia sits over even routine changes.
The site and its operator
Berlin has three large Soviet memorials: in the Tiergarten, in Volkspark Schönholzer Heide, and in Treptower Park. The Treptower Park ensemble was built between 1946 and 1949 to designs by a Soviet collective led by architect Yakov S. Belopolski, sculptor Yevgeny V. Vuchetich, painter Alexander A. Gorpenko, and engineer Sarra S. Walerius. Its central element is the mausoleum with the bronze soldier, and the grounds contain the graves of more than 7,000 fallen Soviet soldiers, according to Grün Berlin, the state-owned company that manages the site.
Grün Berlin GmbH states that it has carried out maintenance tasks at the Soviet Memorial in Treptower Park for the Berlin Senate since 1995. Its published description of the task is precise: to maintain the ensembles of buildings and green spaces with due care, to develop them in a quality manner, to maintain the open spaces with dignity, and to coordinate and accompany renovation measures on the buildings. That sentence contains the whole division of labor in miniature. Grün Berlin maintains the grounds and coordinates building works; it does not own the memorial, and it is not the body that decides what may be changed.
The district of Treptow-Köpenick, where the memorial lies, is the location but not the operator. The available sources do not support the assumption that the district mows the lawns or holds the maintenance contract. The district’s role is territorial and political; the operational role belongs to a state company acting for the Senate.
The legal frame: a treaty obligation and an unresolved competence
The maintenance obligation is usually traced to the Two Plus Four Agreement, under which Germany agreed to assume maintenance and repair responsibility for all war memorials in the country, including the Soviet memorial in Treptower Park, and to consult Russia before making changes to the memorial. That summary appears in the standard reference literature on the site; the primary treaty text and the relevant provisions of the 1990 German-Soviet neighborhood treaty should be consulted directly for the exact wording, because the difference between a duty to maintain, a duty to consult, and a right of approval matters enormously in practice.
What is documented is that the division of competence between the federal government and the Länder was contested from the start. In a 1997 answer to a parliamentary question in the Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus, the Berlin Senate quoted the federal government’s position that the upkeep of monuments is fundamentally a matter for the Länder, including the Soviet monuments, and that the German-Soviet neighborhood treaty of 9 November 1990 had not changed that constitutional allocation. The Senate then added its own view: the memorials in the former Reich capital were built with reference to Germany as a whole, by size, monumentality, and symbolism, and were therefore of national significance. While expressly noting that legal competence remained untouched and still in need of clarification, Berlin declared in 1995 that it would carry the running maintenance costs, including necessary investments, from 1996 onward, provided that the arrangement was renegotiated in 1998 for the period after 2000.
That passage is worth reading slowly. The Senate asserted national significance while conceding that legal responsibility was unresolved. It accepted a financial burden without settling the question of who was ultimately liable. The memorial’s upkeep thus began as an administrative compromise rather than a clear statutory assignment, and the compromise has shaped everything since.
Following the money
The 1997 answer also gives the earliest detailed figures available in these sources. Since 1992, 1.9 million DM had been spent on garden maintenance and upkeep, including the graves, and 2.5 million DM on building repairs, particularly for hazard prevention. A 1991 structural survey commissioned by the Senate, prompted by a damage assessment requested by the Federal Ministry of the Interior, concluded in 1992 that around 12 million DM would be needed for structural restoration at Treptower. The separation is telling: garden care and grave maintenance were tracked as one budget line, building repair as another. The memorial was already being administered as two objects at once, a cemetery and a monument.
By the time of the general renovation of 2019–2021, the fiscal center of gravity had shifted. In a written answer of 3 May 2021 to a question from the Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus, the Senate reported that federal funds of 7,922,868 euros had been made available: 2.6 million in 2019, 2.6 million in 2020, and 2,722,868 euros in 2021. The financing of the general renovation, the answer states, was 100 percent from federal funds. By 19 April 2021, about 6,046,468 euros had been spent, with about 1,876,400 euros still to be disbursed before completion.
This is a meaningful change from the 1990s arrangement, in which Berlin carried running costs. The renovation was paid for by the federal government, through the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media as funding body, with the Federal Ministry of the Interior as the supreme building inspection authority. The operational client was the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development and Housing; the asset holder was the Senate Department for the Environment, Transport and Climate Protection. The district, the Landesdenkmalamt, firms, and external freelancers were all in constant exchange. The money came from one level of government, the building was commissioned by another, and the site is operated by a third entity.
What maintenance actually means
The 2021 answer lists the completed works, and the list is a useful corrective to the idea that maintenance is mowing. It includes cleaning of natural stone at the entrance portals, statues, fence bases, and cenotaphs, and of 75 percent of the slab paving; repaving of the forecourt at the Puschkinallee entrance and the path to the Mother Homeland sculpture; small-stone paving from the Mother Homeland to the flag massif; an irrigation system including a shaft structure; a drainage system; water-bound surfaces; lawn surfaces on the grave fields; ramps for barrier-free access; and restoration of the Mother Homeland and Soldier statues, completed in November 2020. The southern area between the flag massif and the soldier statue, with polygonal slabs and small-stone paving including ornaments, was to be finished by October or November 2021, with the contractor Matthäi; a drainage line was being rehabilitated by the Berstlining method by Diringer + Scheidel.
The answer also records a delay. Because the substructure of the polygonal slab surfaces was found to be in worse condition than expected, the renovation extended from May 2021 to October or November 2021. The Senate nonetheless assessed the overall state of the general renovation as positive and stated that the budget would not be exceeded. The completion was to include hedge planting, information panels, and orientation and guidance systems.
This is what the maintenance of a memorial cemetery looks like in practice: stone conservation, drainage, irrigation, accessibility, and the restoration of bronze figures, coordinated across a funding body, a building client, an asset holder, a heritage authority, and a state company. The lawn is the least of it, and the least visible part of the budget.
The dispersed accountability
The structure that emerges is not a failure of any single office. It is a characteristic arrangement of German federal cultural heritage administration, and it has consequences worth naming.
First, accountability is dispersed. Federal money, Senate ownership, Grün Berlin as operator, and the district as location mean that each actor can point to another for the condition of the site. The 1997 Senate answer already conceded that legal competence was unresolved; the 2021 answer shows a functioning coordination among many bodies but does not resolve the underlying question of who is ultimately responsible. Coordination is not the same as accountability.
Second, the treaty consultation right turns routine upkeep into a latent diplomatic question. If Germany must consult Russia before making changes to the memorial, then even pruning, replanting, or replacing paving can become a matter of interstate protocol. The available sources do not document a specific instance of the consultation requirement being invoked for a maintenance decision, and they do not establish that Russia holds a formal approval right over routine works. But the existence of the obligation shapes how conservators plan: works are sequenced and documented with an eye to what might need to be explained.
Third, the shift to 100 percent federal funding re-centralizes fiscal responsibility while leaving operational responsibility local. The federal government now pays for major renovation, but the Senate department commissions it, Grün Berlin coordinates it, and the district hosts it. This is a reasonable division of labor, but it means that the political visibility of the memorial’s condition is distributed across levels of government in ways that make it difficult for any one elected body to answer for day-to-day care.
Fourth, calling the site a park obscures that it is a cemetery with graves. The 1997 answer tracked garden care and grave maintenance together, separate from building repair. The standards that should govern the grounds are cemetery standards, not park standards, and the dignity of the graves is a distinct obligation from the aesthetics of the ensemble. The 2021 works on the lawn surfaces of the grave fields suggest that this distinction is operative in practice, even if it is rarely stated in public discussion.
What the arrangement leaves open
The memorial’s upkeep is both a moral commitment and an administrative compromise. The moral commitment is clear enough: Germany agreed to maintain the graves of soldiers who died fighting the regime that Germany itself had unleashed. The administrative compromise is less clear, and it is where the unresolved tensions lie.
What changes if the funding frame shifts again? The 1990s arrangement had Berlin carrying running costs; the 2019–2021 renovation was federally funded. A return to Land funding, or a new mixed arrangement, would redistribute the political burden without resolving the question of legal competence. What changes if the treaty frame shifts? The consultation obligation is a standing feature of the site’s governance, but its practical scope is not documented in the sources available here. A clearer statement of what counts as a change requiring consultation would make the obligation more predictable for conservators and more legible to the public.
And what of the graves themselves? The sources record the numbers buried and the works on the grave fields, but they do not record who is responsible for the ongoing care of individual graves, or how that care is inspected. The chain of responsibility that begins with a treaty and ends with a mower passes through many hands. The question of who mows Treptower Park is answerable. The question of who answers for it is not, and the arrangement is designed, perhaps unintentionally, to keep it that way.
Sources and further reading
Grün Berlin GmbH, project page and data sheet for the Soviet Memorial in Treptow, including the statement of tasks since 1995 and the figures on the site and burials.
Abgeordnetenhaus von Berlin, Kleine Anfrage Nr. 13/2047 (1997), answer of the Berlin Senate on the Soviet Memorial in Treptower Park, including the federal-Land competence dispute, the 1995 funding declaration, and the 1992 cost estimate.
Abgeordnetenhaus von Berlin, Schriftliche Anfrage Nr. 18/27362 (2021), answer of the Senate on the renovation and timetable, including the federal funding figures, the list of completed works, the contractors, and the delay.
Reference literature on the Soviet War Memorial (Treptower Park) for the Two Plus Four maintenance and consultation obligation; the primary treaty texts should be consulted for exact wording.