Jesse Simon untangles some of the contradictions behind one of Berlin’s most fascinating streets…
If you live in Berlin, the chances are high that your friends will want to visit. As a conscientious host, you’ll probably want to show them around. If they’ve never been before, you’ll be duty-bound to take them to the Brandenburger Tor, and they’ll almost certainly want to see what’s left of the Berlin Wall, which will mean a visit to Bernauer Straße, the East Side Gallery or Checkpoint Charlie.
When that’s out of the way, you can take them to Karl-Marx-Allee. As you watch your friends snapping photos of the street’s distinctive socialist architecture, you may recall the first time you saw the street yourself, how you too were awed by the excessive decoration and intimidating scale. Regardless of how your rational mind may feel about the architectural styles or social ideologies, the brash monumentality and sincerity of expression are enough to take your breath away. And rightly so, for Karl-Marx-Allee was engineered, above all else, to be impressive.
As the first major post-war reconstruction project in the newly formed East Germany, Karl-Marx-Allee had to be a show-stopper: it wasn’t merely a chance to put socialist housing ideals into practice, but an opportunity to demonstrate to the Allied powers watching from the Western sectors just how quickly and efficiently such a vast undertaking could be achieved in a well-organised socialist state.
What emerged was an improbable marriage of progressive post-war urbanism and neo-classical bombast, a grand boulevard as impossible to discount as it was to ignore. Some seventy years after its first buildings went up, Karl-Marx-Allee remains an unresolved mess of stylistic and ideological contradictions, and one of Berlin’s most endlessly fascinating avenues.
Modest Beginnings
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Große Frankfurter Straße was a broad road that passed through Berlin’s eastern neighbourhoods on its way towards the villages of Lichtenberg and Friedrichsfelde. It did not run all the way to Alexanderplatz, as it does today, but started at the point where Kaiserstraße and Kleine Frankfurter Straße converged (both streets vanished after the War, but they would have met near modern-day Schillingstraße).
The route had long been in use as the main eastern road leading, as the name would suggest, to the town of Frankfurt on the Oder. By 1930, however, it was a bustling metropolitan avenue, and it’s arterial importance within the city was confirmed with the opening of U-Bahn Line E (today’s U5), which ran beneath it.
As with so many parts of Berlin, the neighbourhoods around Große Frankfurter Straße were damaged extensively by Allied bombs, and at the end of the Second World War there were many sections from which nothing could be salvaged. For Berlin’s citizens the war had been an immeasurable tragedy, but for its planners it was the chance of a lifetime, the opportunity to say goodbye to the chaos of the industrial era, and rebuild the heart of the city according to the principles of modernism.
The initial plan for Große Frankfurte…