The tender of a competition for the construction of the monument

In 2006, the decision-making committee chaired by Professor Dr Stefanie Endlich, suggested the draft of Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz. This draft was then accepted and implemented by the city of Ravensburg and the Centre for Psychiatry Südwürttemberg.

With their draft for the monument at Weissenau, Hoheisel und Knitz recall the GEKRAT´s transport buses. Their draft should not only commemorate the victims of the so-called “euthanasia”: the bus, as a monument, also reflects deed and perpetrators. The artists used the grey buses as a transport medium of memory.  

The former gate of today’s Centre for Psychiatry represents a fixed location of the first monument bus. Here we find an authentic place which reproduces nearly unchanged the structural situation at the time of the “euthanasia” transports. There is a place, where the buses with the patients from Weissenau passed on the way to Grafeneck´s killing centre.

In the erection of the monument, the wrought-iron portals of the Old Gate were first opened. Later, however, they were blocked again by placing a concrete bus sliced in segments in the passage. The bus was provided by a central corridor. This concept generated interior walls, which are inscribed by a paraphrased patient quote: “Where are you taking us?”

At the same time, today’s visitors, patients and staff of the Centre for Psychiatry can enter and leave the clinic premises through this corridor. By means of this monument, the Old Gate is an interface between the clinic and the city: the district’s traffic runs exactly on this gate, to this day.   

With the second displaceable bus, memory will be transported to other regions, where death transports also took place.

These stations of the second bus are documented here:

http://www.forschung-bw.de/en/history/greybuses/locations.html