On my last afternoon I went on a walking tour of East Berlin – or at least, around some remnants thereof. I organised this through AirBnB – it was one of their ‘experiences’ for Berlin and was advertised as “East Berlin with a travel book writer”. The walk lasted for just over three hours and to be honest was quite tough going – I was pretty tired by the end, as we were on our feet through most of what was a hot afternoon. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It gave a fascinating glimpse into some aspects – probably some of the better aspects, to be honest – of a vanished state.
The first half of the tour was a walk along Karl-Marx-Allee. This runs eastwards from the Alexanderplatz area in what was East Berlin. In fact we began with a quick look around Alexanderplatz itself and had the various buildings explained to us. Some were definitely GDR (German Democratic Republic, i.e. East Germany) era, and some, to our surprise, dated from earlier, the 20s and 30s. That said, most of what was there before WWII was barely there by the end – I read that in 1945 the Red Army fought it way through Berlin via Alexanderplatz and I gather that as a result pretty much everything there was destroyed. After the war the station was repaired and brought back into use, some of the existing buildings were restored and the rubble of other buildings was removed, thus leaving space for GDR-era new buildings.
And the renewal continued down a grand boulevard just a short distance away from Alexanderplatz. Immediately after the war it was named Stalin-Allee, but after Stalin’s death it was renamed Karl-Marx-Allee, and that’s the name it still bears. This was the showpiece of GDR domestic building. Like many housing developments in communist cities it features large apartment blocks, but in this case it was allied to German engineering skills, and the first blocks at least were cleverly constructed in pre-fabricated sections and assembled on site.
At its height in the late 70s the street was lined with shops, but after reunification they all disappeared – there were more enticing retail opportunities in the west and later in the newly redeveloped areas such as Potsdammerplatz. But in addition to the shops there were other buildings, and some of these have survived. There’s a cinema which was one of the GDR show-piece cinemas – many East German-made films premiered at this cinema, and it has survived just about intact. There’s also a cafe, the Cafe Moscow, which was patronised by leading members of the regime (the ‘nomenklatura’) and by visiting officials from other eastern bloc countries, especially the Soviet Union. There was also a beauty parlour – now a cocktail bar!
At one point along Karl-Marx-Allee (at Straussbergerplatz) there is a modern shop which sells old GDR era furniture and household equipment. I have to say that I found quite a lot of this stuff quite attractive. Some of it was actually reminiscent of similar British furniture from the 50s and 60s. That said, I have a feeling that the GDR furniture was better designed, as it seems to have been the case that, once freed of the shackles of National Socialist era dogma, the designers were able to incorporate echoes of early 20th century design, including of course Bauhaus.
As I say, I found it very attractive, but I also recognise that what was available to the occupants of the best apartments in East Berlin, and the standard of buildings and design on display, was probably not representative of how life was in the GDR generally. It would be interesting to compare these items, and these apartments, with others in the GDR from the same era.
The highlight of the tour occurred after we’d finished our walk along Karl-Marx-Allee. We had some refreshment in a GDR-era cafe that has survived. Again, it’s furnished with preserved/recovered/restored items, and it serves GDR-era refreshments! Presumably these don’t actually date from GDR times…. I had a glass of white wine, which came in a choice of either sweet or dry – nothing about grape variety. Other members of the party enjoyed (?) GDR cola and beer. This was a great 20 minutes or so.
We finished off the tour with a visit to a former industrial area (Schoneweide). This had been an industrial suburb from the late 19th century. It included a light-bulb factory operated by Osram (originally a pre-war German corporation that was split in two after the war), and other factories that manufactured electrical consumer goods (televisions, for example) for the East German market, and electrical transmission and control equipment – huge transformers, for example. The point of our visit was to reveal that within a year of unification all of the employees of these factories were out of work – about 30,000 people. This was just one small industrial district in the GDR, and the same pattern was repeated all over the country. These factories produced perfectly good items, but during the late 70s and the 80s western factories had introduced semi-conductor technology both into their products and their manufacturing techniques, and the GDR factories just couldn’t compete. Despite having one of the more efficient industrial sectors in the communist bloc, East German industry collapsed after unification. The creation of the new Germany had its cost.
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