Neo-historical East Berlin

Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic 1970-1990

Florian Urban

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351915342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política pública de planificación local y regional

In the years prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the leaders of the German Democratic Republic planned to construct a city center that was simultaneously modern and historical, consisting of both redesign of old buildings and new architectural developments. Drawing from recently released archival sources and interviews with former key government officials, decision-makers and architects, this book sheds light not only on this unique programme in postmodern design, but also on the debates which were taking place with the Socialist government.

1

Neo-Historical East Berlin

Six prestige projects

The neo-historical East Berlin evolved since the 1970s as a conglomerate of different design approaches. On the one hand some of East Berlin’s historic neighborhoods, mostly from the late nineteenth century, were renovated. On the other hand, new buildings were erected that made ample use of historic references. Among the latter, one has to distinguish those which more than three decades after their construction during the Second World War were re-erected as more or less accurate copies, and those which were constructed in a historicizing style lacking an exact model. This book focuses on a number of prestige projects that were built during the 1970s and 1980s. This period roughly coincides with the regime of Erich Honecker, who ruled the “First Socialist State on German Soil” from 1971 to 1989. The first large-scale renovation project was carried out since 1972 in the Arnimplatz neighborhood in the Prenzlauer Berg district. For the first time in both East and West Germany, an entire late-nineteenth-century tenement quarter was not taken down but renovated and adapted to modern standards. Other tenement remodeling projects were carried out in the 1980s. Husemannstraße, which was also situated in the Prenzlauer Berg district, and Sophienstraße in the Mitte district were refurbished and fitted out as shopping and entertainment areas with a “historical flair.” The existing buildings, on Husemannstraße from the late nineteenth and on Sophienstraße from both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were renovated and decorated with historicizing elements. These renovations were very limited in their scope and did not stop the bulk of East Berlin’s historic neighborhoods from dilapidating, but they evidenced a changing approach that a decade before would not even have been thought of. Other historic locations were completely reinvented. The Nikolaiviertel, the site of Berlin’s medieval nucleus that was almost completely destroyed in the Second World War, was rebuilt from bricks, steel frames, and precast concrete slabs. At the Platz der Akademie/Gendarmenmarkt square, which was also destroyed in the war, numerous buildings were rebuilt in a different way after 1979, using historical references. Today, one can again admire the former Playhouse (now Concert House) designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the baroque French and German Churches, and a number of bourgeois residences with façade elements referencing the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The most ambitious neo-historical project in East Berlin nevertheless remained unfinished. On Friedrichstraße in the Mitte district, the socialist rulers planned to build a glamorous shopping and entertainment district that was so far unheard of under socialism, with formal and programmatic references to the boulevard’s heyday at the turn of the twentieth century. The project was suspended for economic reasons; its remainders were taken down after German reunification.

East Berlin’s neo-historical developments are relentlessly popular. The highly popular Baedeker tourist guide calls the Platz der Akademie/Gendarmenmarkt “Berlin’s most beautiful and most harmonic square.”¹ It is used as a backdrop for governmental celebrations and cultural events; its restaurants and cafés are continuously filled. The Old-Berlin-style eateries, bars, and gift shops in the Nikolaiviertel, on Husemannstraße, and on Sophienstraße are equally attractive for both tourists and locals. The Grand Hotel (now Westin Grand Hotel) on Friedrichstraße and the Dom Hotel (now Hilton) on Gendarmenmarkt, which were both erected in the late 1980s, are still among the city’s most prestigious accommodations. The area around Husemannstraße in the Prenzlauer Berg district, the Spandauer Vorstadt neighborhood around Sophienstraße in the Mitte district, and the neighborhood around Friedrichstraße and Gendarmenmarkt are among the most sought-after locations for residence and commerce. But what is most surprising is that in contemporary Berlin none of these developments is connected with the late socialist regime that mandated their construction. The historical similarities in the urban design on both sides of the now vanished Berlin Wall seems to be incompatible with the self-understanding of nearly all political factions. They neither fit with the ideas of conservative ideologues from the former West, who interpret the German reunification first and foremost as a liberation of the other half, nor with those of loyal socialists from the former East, who saw it as a defeat of their state, and also not with those of the former East German opposition and their sympathizers in the West, who saw it as an unfriendly take-over by the forces of capitalism. Hence the cultural constellations in the last decades of the GDR, which form the background for those projects, are hardly mentioned. Putting the neo-historical developments from the late socialist period into a historical context, it seems, first and foremost requires clearing the view on that very recent epoch from the cast of collective forgetting.

Modernism and neo-historicism in the 1950s and 1960s

Before the historic city in East Germany became popular once again during the 1970s and 1980s, an earlier period had already witnessed a fascination with the architecture of the past. From 1950 to approximately 1955 East German architects were pressed to imitate Stalinist designs from the Soviet Union.² This so-called “National Tradition” was inspired by various historic styles; the “national” aspect was construed through references from eighteenth and nineteenth century architects such as Carl von Gontard and Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The most famous outcome of this approach was the Stalinallee (now Karl-Marx-Allee) in East Berlin, built between 1951 and 1955 as a sequence of representative block perimeter buildings with neoclassical façades and spacious apartments for deserving members of the socialist elite. West Germans soon censured the street as a despicable example of Zuckerbäckerstil (wedding cake style) and associated it with the representative architecture of the Nazi regime. This “national” neoclassicism was a relatively brief period in East German architectural history; by 1955 East German architects stylistically began to orient themselves, again, towards the modernist traditions of the Bauhaus. “National Tradition” nevertheless inspired the reconstruction of the baroque buildings on the boulevard Unter den Linden that began in the Stalinist era or shortly afterwards. They include, most importantly, the Staatsoper (State Opera House, rebuilt 1952–1955) the Hedwigskathedrale (St. Hedwig’s Cathedral, rebuilt 1952–1963), the Prinzessinnenpalais (Princess’s Palace, rebuilt 1963–1964), the Altes Palais (Old Palace, rebuilt 1964—not to be confused with the Royal Palace which was damaged in the war and demolished in 1950, and which is to be reconstructed soon) and the Kronprinzenpalais (Crown Prince’s Palace, rebuilt 1968–1969). These buildings had been destroyed or heavily damaged during the Second World War; the rebuilding only loosely followed the historic models and can be deemed an interpretative reinvention. One can assume that the rebuilding derived from the same impulses as the Stalinallee, most notably the fledgling socialist state’s need for representation and a love for traditional forms combined with local pride. But since these buildings did not form part of the socialist propaganda surrounding the Stalinallee construction, their meaning proved to be more flexible. They are commonly disassociated from Stalinism, and also much less researched. Contrary to the Stalinallee, most visitors now perceive them as originally baroque.

Apart from these select examples of ongoing neo-historicism, construction during the 1960s was based on the tenets of modernism and envisioned steel-and-glass architecture surrounded by park spaces. On the first Building Conference in 1955, the East German leaders mandated the “industrialization of the building industry,” which followed the model that Khrushchev had been implementing in the Soviet Union since 1955 and which was carried out between 1963 and 1968.³ Construction firms were merged to form large Kombinate (state-owned companies); individual design disappeared in favor of mass-produced concrete blocks that were to provide increased living standards and sanitary facilities to all members of society. As a consequence of the increasing standardization, the diversity of traditional craft and technology gradually vanished to the extent that by the end of the German Democratic Republic prefabricated concrete slabs had virtually become the only method of construction. They were often bleak, but easy to build. Hence, as critic Bruno Flierl pointed out, “design for the working class” was no longer aimed at the needs of the workers who inhabited the new buildings but exclusively of those who produced them.⁴ East German construction became more and more a synonym for die Platte (the slab). The first developments made from prefabricated concrete slabs were completed in the late 1960s. Typical apartment buildings of the series P2 had eleven stories, four entrances and approximately 180 dwelling units, and were regularly assembled to form endless developments of identical blocks. Observers almost immediately criticized them as ugly and monotonous, while inhabitants appreciated them for providing central heating and running warm water, which at the time was not available in any old building. Such ambivalent reactions, however, did not change the will of the East German leaders to extend this method of construction. Given the worsening housing shortage in the GDR they saw it as the only means to provide sufficient apartments at acceptable sanitary standards. Slightly simplified one can say that in the last two decades of the GDR all debates over construction, directly or indirectly, centered on “the slab.” It was discussed whether serial construction from prefab concrete elements was to be supported, modified, or stopped.

Until the 1970s, existing historical buildings had a poor reputation to an extent that seems unlikely from a contemporary perspective. This applied especially to Berlin’s late-nineteenth-century tenements that were reviled as Mietskasernen (rental barracks). This building type with five-storys, an ornamental stucco façade towards the street, and backyards with barns and workshops in the inner parts of the block almost immediately since its construction became a symbol for the misery of Berlin’s working class who were forced to live in overcrowded and dim-lit backyard apartments.⁵ In the late 1950s and 1960s, both the East and West Berlin governments mandated to knock down a large number of tenements or at least to remove ornamented stucco façades. Critics later dubbed this policy the “second destruction of Berlin.” In contrast to the West, East Berlin did not sponsor institutionalized urban renewal programs. However, there was a comparable amount of destruction, either to clear the site for new projects or as a consequence of decade-long neglect. The demolitions were fueled both by the promise of a “new Berlin” and by the notoriously bad reputation of the late-nineteenth-century architecture. Despite wartime destruction, the tenements still comprised more than two thirds of the urban in the 1950s; they were thus the most evident sign of the city’s architectural heritage. And this was precisely why progressive planners and politicians called for their demolition. To them, Berlin’s early industrial past equated with the plight of the workers and political backwardness. The tenements epitomized this perception. It was the much-hated milieu famously documented by early-twentieth-century artist Heinrich Zille in his drawings of ragged backyard children and gaunt-faced organ grinders. In the eyes of urban designers and large parts of the population, stucco ornaments and back buildings came to be a cipher for social misery and political oppression.⁶

Figure 1.1 Berlin Districts (Plan: Florian Urban)

The neo-historical tendencies of the 1970s and 1980s can only be understood against the background of the preceding modernist urban design policies, to which they stood in contrast, and on which they were nevertheless based. East Berlin’s center around Alexanderplatz had been redesigned in the late 1960s, and Head of State Walter Ulbricht significantly influenced the new design. It was motivated by the shiny imagery of modernist utopia that had been formulated half a century before: a city of light and glass, situated in a park environment, and navigated by individual motor traffic. The protagonist of the redesign was East Berlin’s long-time Chief Architect Hermann Henselmann, who in his youth had admired the visions of Le Corbusier and had, during a brief period in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of abbreviations and special terms
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Neo-Historical East Berlin
• 2 Obsolescence Becomes Obsolete: Arnimplatz, Arkonaplatz, and Beyond
• 3 “Rekonstruktion”: The Spandauer Vorstadt Neighborhood
• 4 Prefab Old Town: Nikolaiviertel
• 5 “Restauration 1900”: The Prenzlauer Berg district
• 6 Experiencing the Center: Friedrichstraße
• 7 Re-feeling History: The Platz der Akademie (Gendarmenmarkt)
• Conclusion: Faux Past
• Appendix I: Decision-Making Structures in East German Construction
• Appendix II: Urban Design in East Berlin 1970–1990
• Bibliography
• Index