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American Architect Philip Johnson called it “true city planning on a great scale.”²⁰¹ Until the Second Word War, it had been named Frankfurter Allee, passing through the working class district of Friedrichshain, Berlin. The area was reduced to a ruin by Allied bombing, then the Red Army created further damage as they fought their way down this street until they reached the center of the city. As part of the Soviet Sector of the divided city, it was named Stalinallee on the dictator’s seventieth birthday in 1949. Then, after Khrushchev’s admission of Stalin’s crimes, without ceremony in the middle of one night in August 1961 it was renamed Karl-Marx-Allee.²⁰²

If Victor Gruen’s notion of planning was thwarted in the capitalist west, in East Berlin the planners were left to design with reference only to the public interest. The ruins of the war were razed, and a vast boulevard created, 90 meters wide, symbol of the newborn socialist society.

Hermann Henselmann was of part Jewish ancestry, and though he had survived the Nazis, his opportunities to practice as an architect had been few.²⁰³ Henselmann worked on Stalinallee, then in 1953 was appointed head architect for the city of Berlin, capital of the new German Democratic Republic.

Henselmann’s style had originally been Bauhaus-Modernism, but after a delegation of architects and planners traveled to Moscow in 1949, his and his colleagues’ style changed. Moscow State University and the other “seven sisters” were under construction.^§MS1.1.3g So, when the work started on Stalinallee from around Frankfurter Tor, it was in the same monumental, neoclassical style they had seen in Moscow. The Russians called the style “formalism,” as opposed to the “cosmopolitanism” of the Bauhaus style. Or in another reading, Bauhaus modernism was what a party newspaper called cheap “egg carton” construction, expressing “the greed for profit and contempt for humanity of the dying capitalist system.”²⁰⁴

Walking towards the city center from Frankfurter Tor in 1981 and then again in the 2000s, we came to a stretch of construction that began in 1961. This reflected a switch to socialist modernism that also came with the change in the name of the street to Karl-Marx-Allee, and a change at that time in the architectural sentiment of the General Secretary in Moscow – Khrushchev favored modernist functionalism.

Carefully restored and maintained in its original form since the fall of the German Democratic Republic, in a now hyper-commercialized world, Karl-Marx-Allee was eerily strange for its absence of commercial pleading, and remains so today. The trees have grown large, so the broad street is parklike and traffic barely noticeable. Apartment blocks are spaced widely apart. There’s the Kino International Cinema where the premieres of GDR films used to be screened, the former Mocha Milk Ice Bar, and Café Moskau with its Sputnik replica floating above a mural depicting abstractly idealized Soviet life. The artist was Bert Heller, Rector of the Fine Arts Academy. Alongside were schools, daycare centers, doctors’ surgeries, pharmacies – the stuff of everyday material needs for the inhabitants of the Allee. Several stores displayed, museum-like, the latest socialist consumer goods. The shops and cafés, and of course the doctor’s surgeries and daycares, were all publicly owned – suitably enough, suitably spaced, suitably sized to accommodate the people whose right it was to use them, freely.

Further down the street there was Henselmann’s House of Teachers, skirted by its wide mosaic, then his concert Hall, then the Berlin TV tower surmounted by a massive Sputnik look-alike viewing level, for which Henselmann provided the initial designs.

For all its unfreedoms, the GDR was also a country of peculiar freedoms, expressed in the now-strange space of Karl-Marx-Allee: free, universal childcare with public mothers-milk banks; free education; free healthcare. And freedom from the culture of the commodity.

Stranger still, “free body culture.” In this case, freedom was from woolen, pre-lycra swimsuits that were both expensive to purchase in commodity-sparse GDR and uncomfortable when wet. A 1966 survey found that 81 percent of young workers and 87 percent of students bathed or sunbathed nude in public places. Naked and clothed bathers mingled freely. Said one of the interviewees, “Here the woman is not an object of desire, she is a comrade, there is no bikini to excite you.” And another: “The view of another person’s body allows decent people no room for erotic feelings.” And a third: “It is of great value to socialism that nudism prevents any unclean erotic fantasies.”²⁰⁵

Now, we turn from Karl-Marx-Allee onto Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, named after the Communist leader murdered along with his co-leader Rosa Luxemburg by right-wing militias in January 1919. As we cross onto Museum Island on the River Spree, on one side of the street is the pseudo-Baroque cathedral, church and mausoleum for the Hohenzollern Emperors, completed in 1905. Opposite there had been the Palace of the Emperors, just as pseudo-Baroque and not that much older. After the abdication of the last emperor in 1918, Karl Liebknecht stood at one of its balconies to announce the short-lived Free Socialist Republic.

Badly damaged during the Second World War, the Emperor’s palace was demolished by the GDR. In 1976, a new gold-tinted, glass, steel, and marble palace was opened on the site, the Palace of the Republic. Not just a parliament for the party congresses, it was also a gallery and concert hall, with discos, bars, cafés, even a bowling alley, all in one uncommercial building.

From the perspective of our near-universal twenty-first-century experience of pervasive markets, this people’s palace seems strangely configured. A permanent gallery included works commissioned to address the theme, “Are Communists allowed to dream?”

On entering, visitors were greeted by a huge canvas, People on the Beach by Hans Vent, with naked and clothed people pictured together in the same scene as if there were no noticeable difference.²⁰⁶

The German Democratic Republic fell in 1990, and in 2006, the socialists’ palace was demolished.²⁰⁷ In its place a replica of the Emperor’s palace was rebuilt, or at least the façade speaks to that, because façadism is all it is. “No palace without an emperor!” somebody wrote in a comment book for an exhibition showing off the new-old designs.

Protesting the demolition, one man said, “They want to get rid of everything from the GDR … to tear down every symbol, principally out of simple revenge, nothing more.” And a woman: “This was like a second home to me. This is where I came to meet people, to experience culture and beauty. It was part of my life.”²⁰⁸

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²⁰¹ Brian Ladd, 1997, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 187; Aldo Rossi, 1982, The Architecture of the City, translated by D. Ghirardo and J. Ockman, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

²⁰² Owen Hatherley, 2015, Landscapes of Communism, London: Allen Lane, pp. 49–50.

²⁰³ www.archinform.net/arch/281.htm

²⁰⁴ Brian Ladd, 1997, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, p. 183.

²⁰⁵ Josie McLellan, 2007, “State Socialist Bodies: East German Nudism from Ban to Boom,” The Journal of Modern History 79(1):48–79, pp. 65, 73, 67.

²⁰⁶ Barbara Wolbert, 2001, “De-Arranged Spaces: East German Art in the Museums of Unified Germany,” The Anthropology of East Europe Review 19(1):57–64.

²⁰⁷ Christian von Steffelin, 2011, Palast Der Republik, 1994–2010, Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag.

²⁰⁸ https://archive.org/details/Brokedown_Palast

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 252–255. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Hermann Henselmann’s Karl-Marx-Allee §AS2.3d