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Given the fact that in divided Germany, East Berlin was a capital and West Berlin was not, it is not surprising that the most ambitious building projects in the first years after the division transpired in the East. The earliest major representational structures to go up there were the work of the Soviet occupiers rather than the East Germans themselves. In Treptow Park the Soviets erected a (still existent) war memorial, much larger than the one near the Brandenburg Gate. Its central structure consists of a thirty-eight-foot-tall figure of a Soviet soldier standing atop a pedestal made from marble reclaimed from the ruins of Hitler’s Chancellery. The soldier holds a sword in one hand and cradles a rescued child in the other (Berliners naturally said that it would have been more appropriate had he held a ravished woman). On either side of the statue are rows of granite blocks inscribed with uplifting sentiments from Stalin—a kind of Soviet Siegesallee. In a nearby cemetery lie the remains of 3,200 Red Army soldiers who died in the taking of Berlin. The memorial was dedicated on May 8, 1949, four years to the day after the German surrender.

Stone blocks with Stalin’s inscriptions at the Soviet War Memorial, Treptow

The first major functional building to rise from the ruins of central Berlin was the Soviet embassy, which took up the entire space of the old Russian embassy on Unter den Linden and a neighboring lot as well. Designed by Soviet architects in consultation with Stalin, it was more bombastic than its predecessor, featuring fluted pillars, carved balustrades, and other neoclassical ornamentation. Speer and Hitler might have admired everything about this structure save for its large marble bust of Lenin in the forecourt (now of course long gone).

The Soviet embassy set the standard for the most important representational construction undertaken by the East Germans in their new capital in the early 1950s. While the vogue in the West (including West Berlin) was for trashy functional modernism, the Soviets were pushing a grand historicism that supposedly reflected the heroic spirit of the triumphant masses. As a Russian planning document, dutifully adopted by the East Germans, explained: “In its structure and architectural form, the city is the expression of political life and the national consciousness of the people.”

Stalinallee, shortly after its construction

The East German regime attempted to translate this ideal into practice in the construction of the above-mentioned Stalinallee, an eighty-meter-wide boulevard of six- to seven-story buildings that runs for three kilometers through the working-class district of Friedrichshain. The earliest new buildings on this avenue had been designed in a modernist style, harkening back to the Bauhaus, but Ulbricht complained in 1950 that such modesty diminished the importance of the new socialist capital. When the project commenced in earnest in 1951 monumentalism was the word of the day. Based on designs reflecting Soviet influences (primarily Moscow’s Gorky Street) as well as German classicism, the Stalinallee buildings boast facades faced in stone and Meissen tile, along with a plenitude of pillars, balconies, and statuary. At the eastern end of the avenue rise the twin towers of the Frankfurter Tor, a recapitulation of the eighteenth-century church towers flanking Schinkel’s Schauspielhaus on the Gendarmenmarkt. The towers’ designer, the Bauhaus veteran Hermann Henselmann, later admitted that the Stalinallee bore a certain similarity to Nazi architecture, a view echoed by Western architects like Scharoun, who called it “Speerisch.” The similarity is not surprising, given that Speer had also borrowed heavily from Schinkel. In both cases, the German architectural past was co-opted for purposes of cultural validation and propagandistic effect. Here was a street, the East Germans said, which fused the most enlightened ideals of German history with the aspirations of modern socialism.

The Stalinallee was meant to be a template for other grand streets in East Berlin, but the boulevard did not prove a lasting influence. Following Stalin’s death in 1953 and Khrushchev’s subsequent attack on the dictator’s legacy, the cultural pendulum swung back toward functionalism, leaving the Stalinallee a white elephant. Its name was changed to Karl-Marx-Allee in 1961, after which it slowly went to seed. Only with German reunification in 1990 did the street gain new life, now at the hands of urban officials and architects from the West, who insisted it be restored as an early version of postmodernism. Westerners began moving into the renovated apartments, and within ten years of the fall of the Wall the “first street of socialism” was firmly in Western hands.