Stalinallee

We took a walk this afternoon down Stalinallee (renamed Karl Marx Allee in 1961 once dissing Stalin was safe). East Berlin held an architectural competition for the buildings there in 1951. The intention was explicitly anti-modernist and anti-Bauhaus. The Interbau competition that build the Hansaviertel where we live today was a direct response (ours is a Bauhaus architect).

The Stalinallee buildings have a real grandeur. Many have statues or panels with workers and peasants, hammers and sickles, and symbolically virtuous things like loaves of bread. Shops inhabit most of the ground floor of the buildings (unlike the Hansaviertel) and we saw only one vacancy, ironically the Karl Marx bookstore, which appears very recently to have closed (lots of handsome shelves and a beautiful tile floor, but no books).

The Frankfurter Tor (see above) is not quite the end of the architecture, but after the Frankfurter Tor the buildings mostly seem mainly unrenovated -- tiles missing, brickwork exposed, parts of balconies crumbling, and paint missing from the windows. Yet the buildings all have signs indicating historic protection status. Presumably the cleanup operation will reach them soon.

The area just behind Stalinallee had slaughterhouses and was home to a somewhat rough crowd for a time. Now the slaughterhouses are gone, new housing is coming in, and the place is becoming almost trendy. There is definitely some new and interesting architecture.