SECRET
CHEMNITZ:
KARL-MARX-
STADT

Аn urban historian, author, and educator. His work begins with a simple conviction: that the recent past deserves as much care as the distant one. For over two decades he has worked with people in cities across Europe to understand the fragile heritage of the twentieth century — buildings, street names, factories, memories — and to give dignity to the experience of those who lived it.

He has researched totalitarian and post-totalitarian societies, from Mussolini's Italy to the Soviet Union, and authored four books on the cultural history of cities, including The Land of Names (NLO, 2020) and the architectural guidebook Verona and Lake Garda (DOM Publishers, Berlin, 2022).

He is the founder of VeloNotte International, a celebrated series of nighttime architecture rides featured in The New York Times, Domus, and the Evening Standard — including VeloNotte Bauhaus, commissioned by Kulturprojekte Berlin for the Bauhaus centenary in 2019; VeloNotte Karl-Marx-Stadt, part of the Chemnitz European Capital of Culture 2025 programme; and VeloNotte Hamburg 1945, created for the Open Monument Day (Tag des offenen Denkmals) in 2025. Now based in Berlin, he directs DDReams, a laboratory he runs with architecture students at the Fachhochschule Potsdam, dedicated to rethinking the urban spaces of the German Democratic Republic.

Born in 1957, Martin Düspohl holds a degree in Educational Studies (Dipl. Päd.). Until 2017 he served as Head of the Department of Culture and History at the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg District in Berlin and as Director of the district's local history museum (FHXB Museum).

From 2017 to 2021 he was a member of the team responsible for developing the exhibition Berlin Global at the Humboldt Forum — a city biography assembled from objects, oral history and contested memory rather than a single curatorial voice.

Following this he curated, among other projects, an exhibition series marking the 100th anniversary of the Kreuzberg painter-poet Kurt Mühlenhaupt, as well as exhibitions on the Berlin March Revolution of 1848 for the Paul-Singer-Verein.