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Vassar College Digital Window @ Vassar Senior Capstone Projects 2018 Constructing identity in East Berlin: housing, identity, and power in the GDR Max Frank Vassar College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalwindow.vassar.edu/senior_capstone Recommended Citation Frank, Max, "Constructing identity in East Berlin: housing, identity, and power in the GDR" (2018). Senior Capstone Projects. 767. https://digitalwindow.vassar.edu/senior_capstone/767 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Window @ Vassar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Senior Capstone Projects by an authorized administrator of Digital Window @ Vassar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Constructing Identity in East Berlin: Housing, Identity, and Power in the GDR Max Frank May 3, 2018 Senior Thesis Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Arts in Urban Studies _________________________________ Adviser, Tobias Armborst __________________________________ Adviser, Miriam Cohen Table of Contents Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………2 Introduction: Divided Germany……………………………………………………………………………………………….3 Chapter 1: Stalinallee— The Monumental Thoroughfare……………………………………………………….11 Chapter 2: Marzahn—A New Housing Program, Modernism, and The Family………………..………25 Chapter 3: Nikolaiviertel – The Reclamation of the Inner City, Mietskaserne, and Historicized Building …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..41 Conclusion: Housing, Architecture, and East German Identity………………………………………………….60 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………64 Max Frank 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I’m incredibly grateful for all the help and support my two advisors, Professor Armborst and Professor Cohen provided in this thesis writing process. I’m especially thankful for their understanding when my work was slow. I would also like to thank my parents for listening to me talk about this project late at night. They were there when I needed someone to bounce ideas off of, even if they weren’t sure what I was talking about. Finally, I acknowledge the wonderful people at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. They were incredibly helpful working with me to help me find what I was looking. Max Frank 2 Introduction: Divided Germany After the end of the Second World War Germany was divided into four sectors. Three of these sectors were controlled by the western powers: France, Great Britain, and the United States. The fourth sector in the east was controlled by the Soviet Union. Significantly, it was not only the country itself that was divided, but also the city of Berlin, Nazi Germany’s former capital. Each of the four powers controlled a portion of the city with the United States, Britain, and France in the west and the Soviet Union in the eastern part of the city. The newly installed socialist government in the east would come to be controlled by one political party: the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), or the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. Under the watchful eyes of the four controlling powers two new German governments were founded. In the west, composed of the territory under the authority of the United States, France, and Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was founded. This government would take the form of a democratic capitalist government with political and economic values most closely resembling those of the United States. In the east, with the help of the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Repubic (GDR) was founded. The government in the east modeled itself in the Soviet socialist style. This placed Germany, and specifically Berlin with its own internal border between east and west, at the heart of the Cold War. When one looks at a map of divided Germany, one can see that Berlin itself lies deep within East Germany itself. This creates a situation where there is a small island of the west located in the heart of the east. What this Max Frank 3 shows is the political and symbolic significance of maintaining control over the former capital of the former German capital. While East Germany maintained their capital in Berlin, the GDR moved their capital to Bonn. Beyond division of political power in Berlin, much of the city itself was nearly in ruins. The results of 350 bombing raids and fighting in the streets left thousands of tons of rubble to be removed1, seventy-five percent of the city’s building destroyed, and one- third to one-half of the city’s housing stock, especially in central neighborhoods, destroyed.2 Furthermore, the existing housing in Berlin was substandard. Much of the housing in the city consisted of Mietskaserne (also known as rental barracks) similar to tenements. These Mietskaserne sprang up in Berlin in the nineteenth century as the city grew as an industrial and increasingly powerful political center. This type of housing was ultimately a result of the 1861 Hobrecht Plan. James Hobrecht, a young engineer, created a new plan in anticipation of the rapid expansion of the city (Berlin would grow from a population of 932,000 in 1871 to 3.8 million by 1919). His plan laid out the city in large grids divided by wide boulevards. The grids were intended to be divided up by smaller streets, but because of an absence of building regulation, the land was quickly bought up and Mietskaserne were constructed with little regard for the intricacies of the plan.3 Mietskaserne were multistory apartment buildings centered around a small, dark central courtyard. Typically, wealthier middle 1 Jennifer V. Evans, “Life Among the Ruins: Sex, Space, and Subculture in Zero Hour Berlin”, in Berlin Divided City, 1945-1989, (Berghan Books, 2011), 11. 2 Pugh, Emily. Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin, 31. 3 Ibid. 20. Max Frank 4 class people moved into the front of the buildings on the lower floors. These were more accessible and received the most light and fresh air. As one moved further back into the courtyards of the buildings, the apartments would get smaller, darker, and more crowded. The housing was incredibly crowded and more often than not lacked heat and often running water.4 Mietskaserne weren’t typically great places to live when they were first built, and as time and war caused the deterioration of this housing, a new solution needed to be found. Post war housing projects would become attempts to create changing models that addressed the lack of adequate housing within the city, both in the East and the West. At the same time, the GDR wanted to project a vision of modernity and, mostly, a forward looking future for both the city and a socialist Germany. In the Words of Emily Pugh in Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin, “For many architects the goal in embracing a new style and approach to architecture was to address and ultimately solve the problems of the modern metropolis and its masses of people”.5 This is the situation, both politically and with relation to Berlin’s housing, in which the occupying powers, architects, planners, and Berliners found themselves at the end of the war, and a situation that is strikingly similar for the creation of Mietskaserne in the first place. The destruction of the city and new political opportunities provided planners, governments, and architects the ability to rebuild Berlin from the rubble. At the same 4 Ibid., 20. 5 Ibid., 23. Max Frank 5 time, this new construction expressed a narrative of new German identities and political power breaking and distancing themselves from the recent fascist past. Although there is a lot to be said about the differences in approaches to housing in both East and West Berlin, this thesis looks specifically at how housing changed throughout the Cold War under the direction of the socialist German Democratic Republic in East Berlin. The story of housing in East Berlin during this period is not simply a narrative of changing architectural styles, but also one of the exercise of power and policy under the direction of the SED to make, remake, and create new built space to project its values, power, and prestige in a larger contested space—that of post war, and later, Cold War Germany. Furthermore, these architectural developments, ones that have some of the most direct impact on the everyday lives of East German citizens, also defined and redefined what the state believed a socialist German identity should look like. In short, the government of East Germany, and specifically the ruling SED, used the architecture of housing to project the power and political values of the state, and, to a degree, to define and redefine a socialist German identity. This not only meant addressing real issues related to housing in post-war East Germany, but also the use of housing as prestige projects in East Berlin to promote the international standing of the German Democratic Republic in a city that would become one of the most prominent symbols of the Cold War. This study of housing in Cold War East Berlin look at three specific projects: Stalinallee, Marzahn, and Nikolaiviertel. Each represents a change in direction of architectural thought based around three organizing principles, as well as a change to Max Frank 6 what it meant to be a citizen of the German Democratic Republic. First, Stalinallee is built around the main thoroughfare that runs through the apartment blocks: this is the main feature around which everything else was organized. Second, Marzahn was organized around the family and their individual apartment. The apartment, and the conglomeration of many apartments, was the medium through which the state would provide the space for families to raise children into a purely socialist world. Finally, Nikolaiviertel, among other areas in central East Berlin, was organized around the Kiez, or neighborhood. The Kiez is a return to more traditional forms of societal organization and structure. These organizational principles, as will be elaborated in the following chapters, comprise the most basic elements of the arc historical of building and renovation in the GDR.

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