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  neo-historical east berlin 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 hand- painted 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  neo-historical east berlin 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  neo-historical east berlin 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  neo-historical east berlin

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.