3.5-tonne piece, long buried and mostly forgotten in a forest on the edge of the city, will feature in exhibition of key figures from German history

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

A quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lenin has made a comeback of sorts, after authorities unearthed a granite head of the Russian revolutionary to haul it across the German capital.

The 3.5-tonne piece, long buried and half forgotten in a forest on the edge of the city, will become a highlight of a new museum exhibit of key figures that played a role in Germany’s turbulent history.

Workers dug up the likeness of the communist leader on Thursday and used an industrial crane to lift it on to a lorry.

The scene was reminiscent of one from 2003 reunification comedy Good Bye, Lenin! in which Lenin’s head was airlifted by helicopter across the roofs of Berlin, symbolising the demise of communist East Germany.

At the height of the cold war the 1.7-metre head was part of a statue carved from Ukrainian pink granite that towered 19 metres above East Berlin, framed by Soviet prefab apartment tower blocks.

It was designed by Nikolai Tomsky, then president of the Soviet Academy of Arts, and its massive stone blocks were hauled from Russia to the GDR in a convoy of trucks.

The statue was inaugurated before 200,000 people on 19 April 1970, three days before the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, and stayed there for 31 years, dominating a square named after the Bolshevik revolutionary.

After a wave of people-power brought down the wall and the iron curtain – sending Lenin and Marx statues toppling across eastern Europe – the Berlin icon too became a focus of public anger.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A woman wipes sand from the eyes of the statue of Lenin’s head. Photograph: Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images

The first mayor of reunited Berlin, the conservative Eberhard Diepgen, ordered its removal in late 1991, wanting to rid the city of an icon of a “dictatorship where people were persecuted and murdered”.

The statue was disassembled over months as workers cut through granite, concrete and steel beams inside, splitting Lenin into about 120 parts. The pieces were then trucked to a secluded forest in Berlin’s far south-east and buried in sandy earth.

For long it seemed Lenin’s head would remain buried, until historians started campaigning for its excavation. As recently as a year ago, the Berlin government claimed no one knew exactly where it was, at which point a Berlin-based US film-maker helped out.

Rick Minnich told local media he knew where it lay, having partially unearthed it in the 1990s for a film project.

Local officials relented and gave the OK, but the excavation was further delayed when environmentalists identified a colony of endangered sand lizards, which, after a biological field study, were resettled on a nearby pile of rocks.

In its new home, the Spandau Citadel museum in Berlin, Lenin’s head will be a showpiece of the exhibition Unveiled: Berlin and its Monuments.