East Berlin, Capital of the German Democratic Republic
East Berlin was declared capital of the German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany) upon the formation of the new nation in October 1949. As a result, and unlike its western counterpart, East Berlin was always at the very center of national development plans and a formally recognized center of activity, attention, and investment throughout the period of division. For example, East Berlin was the site of the first major postwar development: the housing complex along Stalinallee, built between 1950 and 1953.
The early 1960s was a period of economic resurgence and architectural experimentation in East Germany, as the nominal excuse for censorship—Berlin’s and Germany’s open borders—had been “solved,” according to the ruling party, by the 1961 closure. The architectural experimentation that followed led to the construction of a number of striking new buildings in East Berlin in this decade, in particular along Stalinallee (renamed Karl-Marx-Allee in 1961). These included House of Teachers conference center (1962–64) and the TV Tower (1965–69), both designed by Hermann Henselmann, as well as the Kino International movie theater (1961–63) and the Hotel Berolina (1961–63), both designed by Josef Kaiser. These buildings were part of a plan to make East Berlin into a grand and impressive capital city, which would both demonstrate the superiority of East Germany and outshine the “other,” non-capital Berlin.
The period of openness and experimentation of the early 1960s was, however, short-lived. Throughout the remainder of the decade, the East German government pursued a course of “radical standardization,” with the goal of building ever faster and more cheaply in order to combat a nationwide housing shortage. In 1971 East Germany’s first head of state, Walter Ulbricht, was deposed, replaced with much fanfare by Erich Honecker. The centerpiece of Honecker’s new slate of policies was an ambitious housing construction program (Wohnungsbauprogramm), which promised to build millions of housing units and thus resolve by 1990 the continuing housing shortage. To attack this problem, East German officials doubled down on cheap, quick prefabricated construction. Housing projects comprised of these so-called “Plattenbauten” were built on an ever larger scale, and the largest of these were located in East Berlin. The largest was Marzahn, begun in the late 1970s and ultimately consisting of tens of thousands of apartments.
The most symbolically significant structure built in East Berlin by the East German regime, however, was the Palace of the Republic (Heinz Graffunder and collective, 1973–76). Located in Berlin’s historic center, the Palace combined arts and entertainment venues (an avant-garde theater, restaurants, a bowling alley and disco) with an assembly hall for the country’s parliamentary body, the “People’s Chamber” (Volkskammer). The Palace was an exception within East German architecture in virtually every way. A unique prestige building, it was built with limited prefabrication and with no expense spared. It represented the regime and the East German nation, but was also popularly embraced.
The Palace was in many ways like East Berlin itself. The regime attempted to instantiate the most idealized, utopian vision of what the country could be, a vision that was unrealizable outside the building or the capital city. Indeed, even within the Palace and East Berlin, the vision of a what one former citizen calls the “dreamed-of” East Germany (3) could only be maintained through the use of physical and psychological coercion, a system of control that broke down with the toppling of the regime in 1989.
The Wall as Architecture
The Berlin Wall itself was, in many ways, the structure that defined Berlin during its period of division. The Wall—which was actually two separate walls separated by a so-called Death Strip (Todesstreife)—physically dominated the central areas of divided Berlin, shaping physical development on both sides, particularly in the areas closest to it, as well as urban plans for the city, whether such plans addressed its historic borders or only East or West Berlin.
The Wall’s infrastructure, located a few feet inside East Germany, was rebuilt and updated a number of times over the course of the 1960s, ‘70s, and ’80s, evolving from a rough, cinder block construction in the early 1960s to a concrete barrier with a smooth, white surface by the late 1970s. In the Cold War west, images of the Berlin Wall filled western mass media depictions of the city, particularly around 1961 when it was first erected and beginning again in the 1980s when the surface of the westernmost wall began to fill with graffiti. The Wall and its graffiti defined divided Berlin in the western public’s imagination as a bastion of freedom and a site of exuberant and even irreverent open, democratic dialogue.
In East Germany, however, the Wall functioned quite differently. East Germans, of course, saw only the easternmost “hinter wall,” which remained a pristine white through the 1980s. For them, the Wall was a somber reminder of the repression of the East German regime, and some found the graffiti on its western side to be in poor taste. Marianne Birthler, a member of the East German resistance, commented for example in 2011, “we could not understand why someone would want to paint on a gallows.”(4)
The East German regime for its part chose to ignore the Wall in planning East Berlin, treating the former sector border as its final limit. In West Berlin, the question of whether to confront or accommodate the Wall in urban planning was a hotly debated one by the 1980s: to ignore it was viewed as tantamount to accepting it, but, thirty years after its construction, creating a plan for all of Berlin seemed futile. Ultimately, the decision by the East Germans to open the border rendered the question moot. Construction of what is now the capital of Germany began in earnest in 1990, and continues to this day.
Further Reading
Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake, Berlin Divided City, 1945–1989 (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2010).
Christiane F. Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. (San Francisco, CA: Zest Books, 2013).
Brian Ladd, Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Katherine Pence and Paul Betts, Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008).
Emily Pugh, Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014).
Notes
1. Harald Hauswald and Lutz Rathenow, Ost-Berlin: Leben vor dem Mauerfall, 6th ed. (Berlin: Jaron Verlag, 2014), 151.
2. Drucksache80 / Große Anfrage der Fraktion der SPD über Sachstand der Lösungsbemühungen des Konfliktes um die besetzten Hauser, September 6, 1982, p. 3, Instandbesetzer (1983/84): A 163 / GV 111, STERN-Archiv, Baukunstarchiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin.
3. Stefan Wolle, Die heile Welt der Diktatur: Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR 1971–1989 (Berlin: Links Verlag, 1998), 46.
4. Birthler comments were made as part of the discussion following The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall: Perspectives on the Wall 50 Years After it was Built, a presentation by Ms. Birthler and Prof. Hope Harrison hosted by the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at The George Washington University on November 9, 2011.