I am writing this week's blog post, fittingly, inside a café called Commune, branded with the yellow soviet star across its door. Seeing that my last post acted as a tribute to modern, post unification architecture, I thought it fitting, this time, to discuss one area that I feel has been rather neglected since "Die Wende" 26 years ago (1989): Alexanderplatz.
The old Haus der Statistik (Department of Statistics) of the State Security (Stasi) sits, completely empty, next to the bustling commercial hub of Alexanderplatz. This fact is made more surprising when we consider that the building is the size of a city block. It looks as though it has been abandoned for decades. All 8 floors bear the hallmarks of a building ravaged by age, general wear and tear and of course, vandalism. All the glass from the windows more than two floors up has been meticulously removed with a precision that suggests this was more an act of municipal care-taking than vandalism. The walls of the building have flecked paint that has fallen off in clumps to create a facade not unlike the liver diseased skin of the old. Graffiti paints images of societal frustration over the forgotten entrance ways, and wooden boards, used to cover possible entry points, have been turned into billboards for concerts and clubs.
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| Haus der Statistik, Otto Braun Straße |
On this wintry November day, birds fly up the swirling air
currents to the top of the building and peer in through the empty
windows into spaces long vacated by their human tenants. I need not
wonder what they see, I have Youtube for that. Others, more intrepid than me,
have been as curious about this building as I, and gone as far as to join our
winged friends in the empty hallways and desolate offices of the old Haus der Statistik. Their videos and pictures reveal that nothing is left inside those drafty rooms; no mountains of paper containing information on every purchase made, or school records for every East German child, every car bought, book read, test passed, job quit, baby born, house sold, play seen, movie produced, article written and marriage registered. The objective of the Stasi was simple: to know everything. This would have been the building where "everything" was calculated and quantified.
The building stands metres from Alexanderplatz showing the centrality of state security to the East German government. On one side of the building stretches the mighty Karl Marx Straße named thus in 1953 after the often accredited prophet of Communism; Otto Braun Straße on the other side. The heart of old East Berlin was clearly a canvass for heroes of the now lost German Democratic Republic/East Germany (henceforth GDR). The GDR existed as a
separate country next to the Federal Republic of Germany (FDR) for 40
years. Its capital was East Berlin. Today traces of the regime lie in abandoned architecture, Trabi car city tours, crusty old GDR politicians that have made their way into today's Bundestag and of course the remnants of the Berlin Wall
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| Fernsehturm, TV Tower finished in 1969. |
However, one not so abandoned piece of GDR architecture that stands at the centre of Alexanderplatz has become perhaps the most recognisable landmark of Berlin: the TV Tower. The pillar reaching skywards is as phallic in its appearance as its original function. It stands at 368 metres, towering over the rest of Berlin and Europe. It is the tallest structure in Germany and the second tallest in the European Union (the first being in Latvia - Riga Tower). Finished in 1969, the TV Tower was the crowning winner of the architecturally ominous time of "competitive building" in Berlin. This policy directive by both sides led to architectural monstrosities of 1960s proportion to prove whose was bigger, taller, longer, could piss the furthest (oh no, buildings can't piss - my bad). However, Walter Ulbricht's GDR brought this to an end, thankfully, in 1969 with the TV Tower. Finally, Walter could be assured that his was indeed taller than the West's - arguably the most important policy objective of any cold war politician.
That political rivalry that had turned into architectural competition came to clamouring halt though in 1989. On the 9th November the wall fell after perhaps the most famous blunder in press conference history made by the now recently deceased Gunter Schabowski. Within a year Germany was reunified and the GDR was gone.
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| TV Tower from the roof of the Haus der Statistik of the GDR, 1969, by Eva Brüggman |
Stephan Heym, the East German writer, remarked in 1990 that "the GDR will be nothing but a footnote in history", a damning sentiment expressed by an ardent critic (though a committed socialist) of the regime he had lived in since 1949. 26 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, looking at buildings like the forgotten Haus der Statistik, it seems as though he had a point. On the other hand, doesn't everything at one point fade into a footnote?
It makes me wonder about the reasons for remembering at all. Is it living memory that keeps history alive? Or perhaps it's architecture and culture that keeps the past fresh in our minds? Maybe it's trauma that makes us want to remember? Or the need for contemporary regimes to paint a monster in the past to justify the suffering of their own people in the present? What is it about certain times, cultures, institutions and structural changes that intrigues us about history? How and why do we remember at all?
Maybe we hope that remembering past traumas will help us to mitigate them in the future. Or maybe we remember past greatnesses (British colonialists built railways in India didn't you know) in order to feel the slightest bit relevant to the present. It seems to me that there is always a reason for remembering some things and forgetting other things. Complicated narratives of people having diverse experiences of the same period can seem too difficult to integrate into historical study that often craves simplicity. Remembering the GDR is no different.
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| Haus der Statistik in the background taken from Alexanderplatz, 1971, Hubert Link. |
Films like "The Lives of Others" have constrained our popular understanding of the GDR to the ugliest part of its rather mundane footwear. However, other films, like "Goodbye Lenin" and "Sonnenallee" paint the other extreme of a naive culture that perhaps did have a better concept of solidarity, community and social good than we have today. The truth, or millions of simultaneous truths that exist side by side in history, is often somewhere in the midst of the extremes: the GDR had a perverse surveillance system; the GDR had very little consumer choice; the SED party of the GDR was convinced that anyone wanting to be different from the socialist stereotype was a threat to society that needed to be expunged. The GDR forced at least 400,000 people to flee its borders, often in perilous ways, after they put up a wall in 1961 to keep their citizens inside; the GDR was a totalitarian regime without real democratic choice.
But on the other hand, the GDR had universal healthcare, education and social security. The GDR had housing for all its citizens. The GDR provided free childcare so that women could aspire alongside their male counterparts, rather than being biologically hindered in their professional lives. The GDR had a sense of social obligation that brought people companionship that today is often lacking. The GDR had a central sentiment that no one, no matter what socio-economic background they came from, was better than anyone else. The GDR had very little crime (no one had all that much to steal anyway). All these things existed next to each other, meaning that when we look back now - 26 years to the day after the Berlin Wall fell - we see a jumbled mess of good and bad aspects of a mostly content but imprisoned citizenry.
It makes me wonder how people in the future will view our society. Our global society. A society that has an incredibly intrusive mass surveillance system; a society with camps for those that don't fit in (just go to Calais to see what I mean); a society incapable of making much needed global decisions because of outdated concepts of nationalistic need; and finally, a society with a global rich (in which I include myself) that tirelessly exploits those unable to defend themselves against its ravages. How will they look back on our society? How will we be judged? Will abandoned buildings in the centre of old financial districts paint poignant pictures of a broken past? Perhaps.
One thing that GDR history has taught me for certain though, is that freedom, perceived or real, is fundamental to a human being's sense of self. Once you have placed the shackles on people for long enough, they will fight back. In the GDR they fought back peacefully and on the 9th November 1989, without bloodshed, the citizens of East Germany were finally able to call themselves free.
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| Alexanderplatz protest, 4th November 1989. 500,000 East Germans gathered on Alexanderplatz to protest for freedom of press, political freedom and freedom of movement. Foto. Peter Zimmerman, 1989 |
For me, Alexanderplatz is the embodiment of these contradictory historical interpretations, which come together to produce a confused though more enlightened vision of a country's past. The abandoned block buildings stand next to modern arcades, restaurants, cinemas and the nerve centre of transport in Berlin, the Alexanderplatz S & U Bahn Station. Decay standing next to progress; just as the sometimes difficult past stands ever next to hope for a better future.
