This was a problem that most East Berliners would have been happy to share. In the first years after Germany’s division East Berlin was not appreciably poorer than the western half of the city, but it had fewer prospects for improvement. Its economy was tightly integrated into that of the new East German state, which in turn was wrapped in the Soviets’ straitjacket of centralized planning. Small firms were consolidated into huge state-run combines that turned inefficiency into an art form. The Russians, moreover, continued to draw extensive reparations from the GDR. While the Soviets, like the West, might hold out a glorious economic future for their part of Germany, they undercut the chances of achieving this by living hard off the land themselves.
The fierce rivalry between the two German states naturally extended to the realm of urban reconstruction, which provided the most obvious forum for displays of material prowess and contrasting political ideals. Being the point on the map where the two systems most sharply collided, Berlin became the focus of ambitious rebuilding programs—East and West. Of course, the process in both cases involved extensive demolition as well as renovation and reconstruction. What the new German regimes decided to raze tells us as much about them as what they built.
The first plan for the reconstruction of Berlin was not yet caught up in the contention between East and West. In 1945, under the auspices of the Magistrat, a committee headed by the well-known architect Hans Scharoun developed an ambitious plan to revamp Berlin according to the most modern urban design principles. In place of the incoherent clutter that had grown up in the Berlin area over the ages, his scheme envisaged a collection of residential/commercial “cells” connected to each other and to outlying industrial complexes by a new network of roads and rail lines. Instead of expanding in concentric rings, which was the old pattern, the new city would follow the course of the Spree River, blending in with the topography and the landscape. Clearly, Scharoun and his colleagues wanted to take advantage of the widespread devastation of Old Berlin to create something completely new. To become reality, however, the plan would have necessitated the total reorganization of Berlin’s infrastructure, much of which had survived the war like the foundation of a burned house. Even if the will for such a task had been there, the resources were not, given the need to balance long-term reconstruction against the short-term requirement of putting roofs over peoples’ heads. Scharoun was fired in 1946, and his scheme remained a utopian dream. Fifty years later, when a change in political circumstances brought new opportunities for a dramatic shift in urban design, Berlin planners would once again discover how difficult it was to uproot an entrenched infrastructure and to translate innovative schemes into reality.
Given the fact that in divided Germany, East Berlin was a capital and West Berlin was not, it is not surprising that the most ambitious building projects in the first years after the division transpired in the East. The earliest major representational structures to go up there were the work of the Soviet occupiers rather than the East Germans themselves. In Treptow Park the Soviets erected a (still existent) war memorial, much larger than the one near the Brandenburg Gate. Its central structure consists of a thirty-eight-foot-tall figure of a Soviet soldier standing atop a pedestal made from marble reclaimed from the ruins of Hitler’s Chancellery. The soldier holds a sword in one hand and cradles a rescued child in the other (Berliners naturally said that it would have been more appropriate had he held a ravished woman). On either side of the statue are rows of granite blocks inscribed with uplifting sentiments from Stalin—a kind of Soviet Siegesallee. In a nearby cemetery lie the remains of 3,200 Red Army soldiers who died in the taking of Berlin. The memorial was dedicated on May 8, 1949, four years to the day after the German surrender.
Stone blocks with Stalin’s inscriptions at the Soviet War Memorial, Treptow
The first major functional building to rise from the ruins of central Berlin was the Soviet embassy, which took up the entire space of the old Russian embassy on Unter den Linden and a neighboring lot as well. Designed by Soviet architects in consultation with Stalin, it was more bombastic than its predecessor, featuring fluted pillars, carved balustrades, and other neoclassical ornamentation. Speer and Hitler might have admired everything about this structure save for its large marble bust of Lenin in the forecourt (now of course long gone).
The Soviet embassy set the standard for the most important representational construction undertaken by the East Germans in their new capital in the early 1950s. While the vogue in the West (including West Berlin) was for trashy functional modernism, the Soviets were pushing a grand historicism that supposedly reflected the heroic spirit of the triumphant masses. As a Russian planning document, dutifully adopted by the East Germans, explained: “In its structure and architectural form, the city is the expression of political life and the national consciousness of the people.”
Stalinallee, shortly after its construction
The East German regime attempted to translate this ideal into practice in the construction of the above-mentioned Stalinallee, an eighty-meter-wide boulevard of six- to seven-story buildings that runs for three kilometers through the working-class district of Friedrichshain. The earliest new buildings on this avenue had been designed in a modernist style, harkening back to the Bauhaus, but Ulbricht complained in 1950 that such modesty diminished the importance of the new socialist capital. When the project commenced in earnest in 1951 monumentalism was the word of the day. Based on designs reflecting Soviet influences (primarily Moscow’s Gorky Street) as well as German classicism, the Stalinallee buildings boast facades faced in stone and Meissen tile, along with a plenitude of pillars, balconies, and statuary. At the eastern end of the avenue rise the twin towers of the Frankfurter Tor, a recapitulation of the eighteenth-century church towers flanking Schinkel’s Schauspielhaus on the Gendarmenmarkt. The towers’ designer, the Bauhaus veteran Hermann Henselmann, later admitted that the Stalinallee bore a certain similarity to Nazi architecture, a view echoed by Western architects like Scharoun, who called it “Speerisch.” The similarity is not surprising, given that Speer had also borrowed heavily from Schinkel. In both cases, the German architectural past was co-opted for purposes of cultural validation and propagandistic effect. Here was a street, the East Germans said, which fused the most enlightened ideals of German history with the aspirations of modern socialism.
The Stalinallee was meant to be a template for other grand streets in East Berlin, but the boulevard did not prove a lasting influence. Following Stalin’s death in 1953 and Khrushchev’s subsequent attack on the dictator’s legacy, the cultural pendulum swung back toward functionalism, leaving the Stalinallee a white elephant. Its name was changed to Karl-Marx-Allee in 1961, after which it slowly went to seed. Only with German reunification in 1990 did the street gain new life, now at the hands of urban officials and architects from the West, who insisted it be restored as an early version of postmodernism. Westerners began moving into the renovated apartments, and within ten years of the fall of the Wall the “first street of socialism” was firmly in Western hands.