About the Divided City, Berlin in the Cold War Walk in Berlin
Following the Soviet blockade of 1948-1949, Berlin effectively became not one city but two: East Berlin controlled by the Soviet-backed German Democratic Republic (GDR) and West Berlin, a satellite of Western Germany deep inside GDR territory. Although German reunification and the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989 have done much to heal and erase the wounds of this "cold" war, much remains of the old, divided Berlin. During this three-hour walk we'll visit key areas of each half where urban design and architecture vividly illustrate the simmering ideological conflict between east and west.
We will begin our discussion on the east side of the city, at Frankfurter Tor at the east end of Karl-Marx-Allee. (Formerly called Stalinallee, this avenue reminds us that part of the history of the two Berlins is recorded in the naming and renaming of streets and sites.) An immensely wide boulevard, Stalinallee was the primary focus of the GDR’s post-war development project, emphasizing the eas
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Following the Soviet blockade of 1948-1949, Berlin effectively became not one city but two: East Berlin controlled by the Soviet-backed German Democratic Republic (GDR) and West Berlin, a satellite of Western Germany deep inside GDR territory. Although German reunification and the demolition of the Berlin Wall in 1989 have done much to heal and erase the wounds of this "cold" war, much remains of the old, divided Berlin. During this three-hour walk we'll visit key areas of each half where urban design and architecture vividly illustrate the simmering ideological conflict between east and west.
We will begin our discussion on the east side of the city, at Frankfurter Tor at the east end of Karl-Marx-Allee. (Formerly called Stalinallee, this avenue reminds us that part of the history of the two Berlins is recorded in the naming and renaming of streets and sites.) An immensely wide boulevard, Stalinallee was the primary focus of the GDR’s post-war development project, emphasizing the east-west axis that extended eastward from the Brandenburg Gate and stressing the political and visual importance of the city center. In the shadows of Hermann Henselmann’s twin towers, we will discuss the 1950 decision by Walter Ulbricht and the communist leadership of East Germany to do away with the “cosmopolitan fantasies” of modernist, decentralized planning and to create instead a monumental architecture capable of embodying the promise of a new socialist society.
We will spend a good amount of time on “Stalin Avenue” discussing the aesthetics of the GDR and how Soviet-influenced classicism was intended to provide everyday workers with the comforts and luxuries of the old bourgeoisie. (We'll also discuss the Uprising of 1953, which began as a strike by overtaxed construction workers on Stalinallee.) Once we have investigated the urbanistic and architectural approach of the GDR, we will hop on Berlin’s historic, elevated S-Bahn line and cross the city’s new government center to the West. Here we will explore West Berlin’s response to the communist model of Stalinallee: the International Building Exhibition of 1957 which was devoted to the reconstruction of the Hansa Quarter.
In this neighborhood in ruins since the Second World War, a host of internationally prominent architects—among them Le Corbusier, Gropius, Scharoun, Aalto and Niemeyer—designed a series of individual, overtly modernist buildings scattered across the green, park-like area. The political and ideological message of this design was clear: if Stalinallee represented neo-classical monumentality and a centralized plan, this western neighborhood, with its deliberate renunciation of axial orientation and regimentation, was intended to embody the Western principles of freedom, individuality, and the non-authoritarian order of democracy and the marketplace. We'll look closely at these messages and attempt to dissect them.
By the end of our time together we will have a good idea of how architecture and urban planning in Berlin were one of the main fronts in the political and ideological struggle of the Cold War.
