Introduction
East German urban design
East German urban design—the term may seem paradoxical for many in the
architectural world. The endless estates of bleak, standardized apartment
blocks were apparently produced without any designer or architect. And this
was all they built in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Or was it? More
than fifteen years after Germany was reunified in 1990, architecture in East
Germany is still largely seen as a footnote to modular housing. The numerous
neo-historical projects in the late phase of the GDR that do not fit this stereotype
are largely ignored as inconsistent exceptions. The new interest in “traditional”
urban design cannot only be read from the most spectacular projects such as the
garish Nikolaiviertel, Berlin’s invented old town, or the reconstructed baroque
buildings on the Platz der Akademie square, which now again bears its old
name, Gendarmenmarkt. In all central areas of East Berlin one finds prefab blocks
from the 1980s that show similarities to the adjacent late-nineteenth-century
tenements and to other historical styles. They were erected on the block perimeter
from precast concrete parts and adorned with loggias, gables, bay windows, tile
ornaments, and mosaics. Neo-historical relics such as ornamented street signs,
cast-iron lampposts, period gift shops, newly built “Old Berlin restaurants,” and
a number of partially remodeled late-nineteenth-century neighborhoods bear
witness to a new popularity of the old city in the last decades of the German
Democratic Republic. How can this change be explained? Why has the East
German regime, which for decades thought modernist architecture to be the
only appropriate expression of a socialist system, all of a sudden represented
itself with rebuilt gothic and baroque churches, remodeled nineteenth-century
residences, and newly erected pseudo-historical department stores? Why did
East Berlin architects design arbors and ornamented façades in the center, while
at the same time the large tower block developments on the periphery were still
under construction?
It is the objective of this book to add the forgotten final chapter to the
history of East German urban design. This book looks at the gradual change
in urban design from functional modernism to neo-traditional projects. This
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transformation took place against the background of an international cultural
development. The new “historic city” in East Berlin responded to a global
socio-economic change within the narrow framework of the socialist regime.
A focal point of this development was the “Capital of the German Democratic
Republic.” East Berlin was not only a capital, a divided half, and a showcase of
the Eastern bloc, but at the same time a place where prevalent social and cultural
phenomena manifested in a condensed form. The conditions of modernity
and its expression in architecture and urban design were similar in numerous
industrialized countries of both the Eastern and Western blocs; its modifications
over the course of the 1970s and 1980s therefore have to be regarded as driven
by mutual influences. Looking at East Berlin therefore means taking a slice from
a compound of reciprocities that reached far beyond the boundaries of the city.
During that time, many of East Berlin’s construction projects were surprisingly
similar to those in the West. Even though the German Democratic Republic
lacked the political players that profited from the transformation in capitalist
cities—private businesses and the real estate industry—the new historic East
Berlin echoed many aspects of the revitalized city centers in the West. Parallels
can be found not only to the showcase buildings of the International Building
Exhibit (IBA) in West Berlin, but similarly to the numerous inner cities in Western
Europe and North America that were renovated for well-to-do residents and
tourists and outfitted with the insignia of a real or invented past. In the GDR
the spirit of the Venice Charter was also palpable, which in 1964 marked the
break with the modernist models, the beginning of contextual urbanism, and
the shift toward new preservationist concepts. Cities were now thought of as
ensembles, and at least in theory it was no longer the individual old building
that was to be preserved, but rather the entire urban fabric. It was not only the
West that influenced the East. The remodeling of the late-nineteenth-century
neighborhood around the Arnimplatz in East Berlin, for example, provided a
model for the large-scale modernizations in West Berlin, and the neo-historical
buildings on Platz der Akademie/Gendarmenmarkt pre-dated the numerous
reconstructions of historical neighborhoods in the West. Similarly, the “historic
city” as it was planned under the socialist regime during the 1970s and 1980s
anticipated the transformation of East Berlin neighborhoods after the German
reunification. This is even more surprising since post-reunification policy in the
Eastern half of Berlin lay almost exclusively in the hands of West Germans.
However, there are significant similarities, on the one hand with regard to
the policy of “critical reconstruction,” on the other hand with regard to a new
fascination with micro-histories and historical remainders in the urban fabric.
Despite profound political and social breaks the German reunification was
hardly a “zero hour.” Contrary to what many critics claim there was a significant
degree of continuity that extended beyond the end of the socialist era.
The first chapter of this book will set the neo-historical projects in the context
of East German architectural policy in the postwar decades and provide an
overview over the most important scholarly treatments of the subject.
introduction
Chapter 2 sheds light on the idea of an “obsolete neighborhood.” Widely
popular during the 1960s, the concept was connected to the biological analogy
of an “urban life cycle,” after the completion of which any neighborhood
inevitably had to be torn down and built anew. Consequently, the entire city
was scheduled for periodical demolition. These plans were first suspended in
the early 1970s, when the tenements in the Arnimplatz neighborhood were
remodeled and the “life cycle” prolonged. For decades, the demolition of this
area continued to be planned, but was eventually deferred indefinitely.
Chapter 3 traces the contradictory history of urban design in the Spandauer
Vorstadt in Berlin’s Mitte district, which after the German reunification became
an “arty” neighborhood with swanky bars, high-class boutiques, and rising
real estate prices. For more than 30 years, the area remained the subject of
“reconstruction” plans—only that until the 1970s, the term “reconstruction”
was used synonymous with comprehensive demolition, while later it
implied a more or less historically accurate remodeling completed with new
construction in a historical style. In the Spandauer Vorstadt, the socialist
leaders attempted to convey an idea of Old Berlin through the reconstruction
of historic façades, shops, and restaurants.
The fourth chapter gives an account of Berlin’s rebuilt medieval nucleus,
the Nikolaiviertel. The area, which had been comprehensively destroyed in
the Second World War, was rebuilt as a shopping and entertainment space for
locals and tourists and is highly popular to date. From the first rebuilding plans
in the mid-1970s to the final construction in a neo-historical style during the
1980s, the project underwent substantial changes. A bizarre gesamtkunstwerk
assembled from prefabricated parts, the Nikolaiviertel exemplifies the eclectic
nature of the historic city in East Germany that promotes an unspecific image
of the past.
Chapter 5 looks at the Prenzlauer Berg district, which in the 1980s witnessed
a conceptual struggle over the nature of the urban. On the one hand, artists
and dissidents appropriated the numerous late-nineteenth-century tenements
in the area as a place for alternative lifestyles within the socialist state. On the
other hand, the state authorities attempted to inscribe their interpretation of
history into the local urban fabric, decorating selected late-nineteenth-century
blocks with period accessories such as gas lamps, placard columns, and handpainted shop signs to provide an “authentic” historic atmosphere. Despite their
apparent political antagonism, both groups shared numerous communalities.
Their approaches were both rooted in an intellectual development, which
over the course of the preceding decade had changed the academic disciplines
of both sociology and architectural theory and directed attention towards
individual social practice.
The sixth chapter presents the re-development of the central boulevard
Friedrichstraße into a classy shopping and entertainment district. The project
remained unfinished by the German reunification and was subsequently
torn down and redesigned by international architects. Making use of both
renovation and new construction in a historic style, Friedrichstraße was
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designed to involve the visitor through unique, subjective experience (Erlebnis).
In this new development, urbanity became a matter of individual consumption
rather than collective action. Unlike most other neo-historical developments
that were completed by the late 1980s and since then have undergone only
small changes, Friedrichstraße largely stayed under construction until 1990.
The government of the reunified city has since abandoned the socialist plans,
demolished the unfinished buildings, and commissioned international
architects to redesign the boulevard.
Chapter 7 looks at the rebuilding of the historic monuments on the Platz
der Akademie one block east of Friedrichstraße in the late 1970s. While the
baroque German and French Churches and Schinkel’s Playhouse on the square
were rebuilt similar to their pre-war aspect, numerous surrounding buildings
were constructed in a historicizing style from prefabricated elements. This
successful historic reinvention made the square a major hub for both locals
and tourists and at the same time a model for a new approach to urban design
in the city center.
Historical documents and oral sources
This book is the result of five years of research. Given the complexity of the
topic it is based on various sources. Head of State Erich Honecker’s plans and
directives only had a small effect on the new construction policy in the GDR,
which to a much larger extent resulted from an interplay between architects,
local Party officials, and the Politburo. Hence, an analysis of construction in East
Germany has to include a view of East German society with its multilayered
power structures. Like any attempt to write East German history, this brings
about a number of methodological problems. The first concerns the available
sources. The archives of the late German Democratic Republic are open to the
public now. From the correspondence of any given city official to the minutes
of the Politburo meetings all documents are generally accessible, often without
the thirty-year restriction that many West German archives apply for politically
sensitive materials. I soon realized, however, that the apparent abundance
of information was fallacious. The minutes of the Politburo meetings, which
during the times of the GDR had remained top secret to an extent that even
most Politburo members were forbidden to view them are surprisingly
uninformative with regard to the basis on which decisions were made. On the
other hand, for example the proposed menu for a state guest was minutely
documented. The East German regime consciously used secrecy as a means
to exert power and hid the actual decision-making process behind a flurry of
bureaucratic proceedings. The principle of not writing down, however, was
not limited to the top leaders. In retrospect it becomes clear that the GDR,
to a much greater extent than the old Federal Republic of Germany, was an
oral culture. There were two main reasons. First, resources were limited, and
written publications were much scarcer than in any capitalist society. Second,
introduction
written documents were often phrased in a roundabout way so not to rouse
the suspicion of superiors. The same applied for official letters. Not to write
down certain ideas was a means to avoid repression. The general estimation
of nearly all East Germans I spoke with was that “one could say much more
than one could write.” For example, oppositional thinkers who were barred
from publication were often still allowed to speak at meetings of professional
organizations and discuss their ideas. As a consequence, their influence relied
to a great degree on their oral presentations for which there are no records
other than the memories of those who attended them. The same applied for the
decision-making structures in Party and state administration. The influence of
a particular official was not necessarily proportional to his (or in very few
cases, her) actual position within the Party ladder. Personal influence was to a
great extent connected with informal contact and oral information exchange.
It was clear to me that next to the written sources from the archives I would
have to rely on interviews and personal conversations with former architects,
construction officials, and politicians. With very few exceptions, all witnesses
whom I contacted were willing to meet. I am particularly grateful for the time
most of them took for our conversations. The interviews were nevertheless
challenging for a number of reasons. For me it was often difficult to draw
the line between which memories appeared to be remembrance, wishful
thinking, or personal judgments on the part of my interviewee. While this is
true for any personal recollection, it was especially palpable in the German
context, where memories of one’s own past under the socialist regime are
often understood as political statements. I addressed this particular situation
with a twofold approach. On the one hand, I always questioned the accuracy
of personal memories. On the other hand, I used oral information to evaluate
and structure written facts and as well as to order the documents from the
archives. Such information seemed reliable to me as long as it was given in a
similar way by two or more different sources.
During all interviews the constellation of interviewer and interviewee
implicitly set the parameters of the conversation. Also this is the case in all
interviews, but it was particularly evident in this situation. I, being a Westerner,
was regarded as a representative of the winning power. This does not mean
that I encountered resentments, on the contrary. The difficulty was rather
that many interview partners consciously perceived the conversation as an
encounter between East and West. On some occasions I felt that they attempted
to justify their actions under a regime that has been deeply discredited. On
other occasions I perceived that they consciously aimed to clear the prejudices
and preconceptions Westerners had about the East and attempted for once
and forever to set the record straight. To a certain extent, I was able to reduce
the tension that resulted from this situation by being upfront about my own
persona. I was born and raised in Munich, West Germany, and moved to
West Berlin as a teenager, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. My own
memories of the GDR are very limited, but positive in many respects. At the
time of the interviews I was a doctoral student at MIT and had lived abroad for
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several years, I had no interest in positioning myself in the swampy territory of
Berlin’s daily politics. And, after all, my objective was not to blame any of my
interviewees for what had happened in East Germany but rather to understand
a historical process which I did not experience and therefore was only able to
trace through academic research. Of course I was not able to deny my personal
background as a West German, as an urban planner and architectural historian,
and as a member of a generation that had been socialized with the renaissance
of historic buildings and a critical attitude towards modernism. But at least I
was able to critically question my position.
A second obstacle was more intricate. In the GDR, remaining silent about
personal responsibilities had been an effective protection against repression.
Many of my interview partners still practiced this strategy more than fifteen
years after the German Reunification. They often used ambiguous speech,
where agency was hidden in endless sequences of passive voices. More than
a decade after the dissolution of the once omnipotent Stasi (State Security
Service), they seemed to perceive the question “who decided?” as a potential
threat. Power, in East German collective memory, was exclusively exerted by
“those above”—and few people seemed to remember who exactly they were
and who collaborated in carrying out their orders. For me this was always
surprising particularly when it referred to something as innocent as a stucco
ornament or a wrought-iron guild sign. Many former East German citizens,
both leaders and subordinates, remained silent even about those decisions
that in retrospect are now widely applauded, such as the preservation of
certain historic buildings. Generally, my interview partners tended to be more
opaque the higher a position they had assumed within the system. Architects
and urban planners who had been in less powerful positions, in the same
way as academics and journalists, were more precise in their accounts. Their
oral accounts were especially important to redraw the constellations of power
within the complex East German political hierarchy. Beyond the well-known
fact that all power in the German Democratic Republic originated from the
Politburo, there was very little written information about the decision-making
power of certain individuals. With regard to urban design, there is very little
information on how the rather imprecise directives from the Politburo were
worked out and implemented. In this context, the memories of colleagues and
inferiors were of much value. They constitute the basis of the information
on the decision-making structures that are presented in the appendix, which,
to my knowledge, constitute the first published attempt to redraw the
configuration of power in East German architecture and urban design.
Of my interview partners, only the architect and university professor Gustav
Hardt-Waltherr Hämer was from West Germany. Hämer was, in the 1970s, a
forerunner of the famous policy of Behutsame Stadterneuerung (Careful Urban
Renewal) that was passed into law by the West Berlin government in 1983.
All the others were former East German citizens. Most had been politicians
or construction officials: next to Politburo member Günter Schabowski and
Director of Construction Günter Peters, there were high-ranking construction
introduction
official Gerhard Trölitzsch and Chief Architect Roland Korn as well as Ludwig
Deiters, the long-time head of the Institut für Denkmalpflege der DDR (Historic
Preservation Authority of the GDR) and his successor Peter Goralczyk. In
addition, the architects Dorothea Krause, Manfred Zache, and Dorothea
Tscheschner had been employed with the local East Berlin Bezirksbaudirektion
(Office of Construction) where they had supervised different construction
projects. Tscheschner co-authored the 1961 master plan and later worked in
the Office of Construction’s Abteilung Wissenschaft und Technik (Department
of Science and Technology), Zache worked on Arnimplatz remodeling
and became head of the Abteilung Komplexe Stadtgestaltung (Department
of Complex Urban Design). Krause was the head of the Sektor Industriebau
(Section of Industrial Construction in the 1960s and head of the Abteilung
Modernisierung (Department of Modernization) in the 1980s. Six other
interview partners were academics. When Fred Staufenbiel was appointed
professor at the Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen (School of Architecture
and Construction) in Weimar, he was the first sociologist teaching at an East
German department of architecture. Architectural theorist Bruno Flierl worked
first at the Building Academy and later at the Humboldt University; he was
one of the most well-known architectural critics in the GDR. Both belonged
to the founding generation of the GDR. The architects Simone Hain and Gerd
Zimmermann, sociologist Christine Hannemann, and urban planner Harald
Kegler had just started their professional careers when the East German state
ceased to exist. Manfred Prasser and Günter Stahn were first and foremost
practicing architects. Prasser was one of the key designers on Friedrichstraße
and Platz der Akademie, while Stahn became famous as the architect of the
Nikolaiviertel. Wolfgang Kil was trained as an architect but soon became a
journalist writing on matters of art and architecture.
This book consciously disregards most biographical elements. Anyone
who writes the intellectual history of a socialist state has to face the often
highly contradictory relation between an idea and its reception among the
state leaders. Being rooted in socialist thinking was no guarantee that an
idea would be well-received by the rulers; being a steadfast supporter of the
system did not mean that one could not face severe repression for making
the wrong statement in the wrong context. On the other hand, there were
numerous niches for critical thinking across ideological boundaries. Instead
of agents and individual biographies, therefore, I chose to look at ideas, texts,
and buildings. Instead of analyzing why and under which context a particular
individual was allowed to circulate a particular idea, I start my investigation
with the outcomes of East German architectural culture—both physical and
written. In my book, the cultural artifacts of East German urban design thus
become catalysts that open the view on the underlying conceptions.
My particular perspective thus necessarily neglects what for most former
East Germans at a personal level were the fundamental features of the state
they lived in: the daily negotiations with the ruling ideology and the powers
that be, the comprehensive health-care and social security, the ubiquity of the
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State Security Service, the absence of unemployment and homelessness, the
continuous mistrust of the next-door-neighbor, the unqualified solidarity and
neighborly help, the omnipresent danger of personal repression, the jokes and
the double entendre, the constant need for improvisation, the security and
the protection, in short, all the small details that made up everyday life in the
German Democratic Republic and that are often so difficult to understand for
the outsider and that now, with over twenty years of historical distance, are
less and less present in the public discourse. The exclusion of these qualities of
daily life, however, opens an opportunity. Largely blinding out biographical
information allows for an analysis of East German construction activities that
is oriented towards the principles and guidelines of urban design and thus
opens the view on the larger picture of a long-term socio-cultural process in
its international context.