Berlin, March 2003, by Kevin Hilgers
From MemoryArchive
Who: Kevin Hilgers, student Where: Berlin, Germany (especially the former East Berlin) When: March 2003
When I visited Berlin in spring 2003, it had been almost 15 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. Lately, though, in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), there had been a rise of sentimentalism toward the old way of life under communism. The concept has been dubbed ostalgie, as products of this cultural movement reflect nostalgic attitudes toward the old East Germany. The German film Good Bye, Lenin captures this attitude in its story about a man who inadvertently manufactures his ideal East Germany while trying to hide the fall of communism from his hardliner mother, who was in a coma during the change. In the scene in which the oblivious mother first leaves her room, she sees a helicopter carry off a massive statue of Lenin. The hulking figure, with his arm extended, soars dramatically across the former East Berlin en route, we assume, to the actual dustbin of history.
Many relics of the communist regime have been removed from Berlin, but for more than 40 years, just as it did literally in the film, the specter of Lenin loomed over the eastern half of the city. When the Soviet Union’s Red Army entered the capital of the Third Reich in April 1945, the pent-up feelings of an ancient vendetta exploded.
But there was much leading up that moment when the hammer and sickle made their mark on the ruined center of fascism. There was much for each side to be hateful toward the other based on recent events and contemporary ideology; fascism and communism were mortal enemies, along with Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. The National Socialists’ violent persecution of communists alarmed the Soviet Union, and gave reason for a few future Socialist Unity Party (SED) leaders to flea to that country. But go further back, before the international politics of the 1930s, to see that Russia took the brunt of casualties in World War I, an event started by German aggression. Go even further back to the 18th century and notice the war against Friedrich the Great’s Prussia. And go back centuries further to see the medieval battle against the Teutonic Knights, a conflict remembered in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1936 film Aleksandr Nevksy, which stirs nationalism and anti-Germanism on the eve of World War II. Taking this history into account, it is no wonder the Soviet troops entered Berlin with a vengeance and a lust for retribution, which manifested itself in the crimes they committed against Berliners. With Stalin’s attitude, “Let the boys have their fun,” it is no wonder that rape and looting were so widespread.
And for decades after the spring of 1945, residents of East Berlin, the area under Soviet administration, endured an extended ideological occupation that was of the same nature. The physical assault on Berliners by the Soviets fell soon fell away, but the cultural assault on them lasted until 1989. The assault came in multiple forms - architecture, urban design, public spaces, relics of the war - and even though that Soviet-backed regime has long since collapsed, evidence of the Soviet influence is still noticeable.
My first encounter with Soviet Berlin, however, did not involve the legacy of the GDR, but an encounter with Ukrainian Berlin. It came one evening when I was on the S1 with some a few people planning to visit the much-hyped Turkish neighborhood of Kreuzberg. The way the seats are arranged on the S-Bahn cars allows a group of three to surround one person in a corner putting that person in the middle of a conversation with strangers. This is exactly what happened. The lucky person that evening was Kristina, a brown-haired girl, probably 16-years-old who looked no different than the high school girls one might meet in Western Europe or North America. But unlike those typical teenagers, Kristina took advantage of the lax S-Bahn rules and brought along an unconventional pet – a rat that she kept in her jacket sleeve. This naturally piqued our curiosity, and we were fortunate that she heard one my friends scattering his speech with German, because she eventually joined in the conversation.
We did not find out much about the rat except that his name was something in German that translated to “spotted head” due to a mark on his head. But what we did learn was that she was from Kiev and lived in Spandau, where she said a lot of Russian speakers lived. This was a big deal for me, since although I had heard a few Russian speakers in Berlin, Kristina was the only one I actually got to speak with. And more surprising, she had heard of my hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, and she may have even said she had family there. Who knows what exactly she said, but the fact was that she embodied my superficial expectations of the plight of youth in Eastern Europe, with her riding the S-Bahn late at night and letting a rat live under her clothes. Perhaps we had found a real-live street urchin! But as much as we tried to imagine, she was probably not the quintessential raised-by-rats street urchin, considering her sharp clothing and that she lived in Spandau, which I believe is not exactly a working-class district. But whatever her story was, Kristina and her rat made it an interesting evening, even though we didn’t end up in Kreuzberg. Maybe that was for the better, since in our long conversation in front of an imbiss at Yorckestrasse U-Bahnhoff, she responded to our plans with “Türken!” and a throat-slashing motion.
Kristina was the only person from the former Soviet Union that I met in Berlin, but the stamp of her native country was all over East Berlin. The free market seems to have come strong to Mitte, a district mentioned in all the tourist literature. But to see the remnants of communist Berlin, it is necessary to go out to far eastern reaches of the city. I did not come to Berlin to only see the gentrified Kurfürstendamm and Hackescher Markt. I wanted to go where people like me from the West had been barred for decades. I found this place first at Ostkreuz, then at Alt-Marzahn.
Ostkreuz is a major transportation center a few kilometers east of Mitte where several S-Bahn lines meet the Ringbahn, which circles the city. I was there for the afternoon rush hour on an overcast day where the gray sky made the equally gray landscape even more foreboding. The station itself looked a little different than its counterparts in West Berlin and in central East Berlin, a little more worn. But leave the station and enter a different world, passing by a collapsing house, a gravelly walkway, a dreary park, and graffiti that was excessive even for Berlin standards. Perhaps it was the cloudy sky and the oncoming night that made the place especially eerie, but Ostkreuz looked to be just as I imagined post-communist Europe. Even if it was Ostkreuz, it was still Berlin, meaning there was still Turkish food. My friend and I ducked into the restaurant just as the dilapidated park started making us feel that it was time to go. There was falafel of course, but it was not the same. It was microwaved and the man at the counter did not seem to like that fact that we were from the United States, even though we made sure to say “tesekkur” (Turkish for “thank you”). But my friend apparently remedied the situation when he met our server in the bathroom and said something like “Bush ist ein krieg kriminal.” I got a glass bottle of Coke to go along with my second-rate Ostkreuz falafel in a restaurant where I did not feel welcome. I am not a fan of Coke, but the familiar taste was surprisingly comforting that evening.
But if Ostkreuz was the shabby side of post-SED life, Alt-Marzahn was life as prescribed by the party. I took the S7 out to Springpfuhl, a station that comes after traveling eastward through kilometers of basically nothing, save a few monstrous high rise apartments. The station is just below Cosmonauten Allee, a boulevard that connects this suburb with Mitte named in a tribute to the Soviet version of the space traveler. Look one way on the street and see high rises, then look the other way and there are more, although in that direction there was a McDonald's. The golden arches proved to be the universal symbol of decent, free bathrooms, which was a rarity in Berlin, although the orgy of graffiti inside was unbelievable.
Just above the station is a stop for trams headed toward Alt-Marzahn. Trams have been nonexistent in western Berlin for decades, but they are still a way of life in the eastern section, where they cover a lot of area in the center and suburbs. The tram made its way up Cosmonauten Allee through a few kilometers of more of the same scenery, brightly colored high rise after brightly colored high rise. These apartments were built after the late 1970s and have become hot property today, as they have such luxuries as private bathrooms, which were rare in central districts. 160,000 people can live in the Marzahn residential complex, the largest in Germany. But for all the giant apartment blocks, the McDonald's was only slightly larger than usual, and there did not seem to be enough stores to supply the people with basic goods.
In the middle of the forest of apartments is Alt-Marzahn, a historical theme park built by the GDR on the site of a medieval settlement. The place looks like an SED version of Busch Gardens at Williamsburg, complete with a churchyard, shops and a windmill perched atop a hill. Who knows why it was built, maybe for morale of the people living in truly monotonous East Berlin suburbia, but the contrast of the faux-medieval structures with late socialist residential planning was striking.
Leaving the wonderland of Alt-Marzahn for the reality of Marzahn, the odd-colored high-rises lining Cosmonauten Allee were clearly visible. There was a strange, yet somehow familiar atmosphere. The wide street and types of people I saw reminded me of a typical American suburb. But then I saw the 20-storey purple and gold apartment, and something seemed not quite right. I was later told that the architectural style found in this district was not too different from the type found in the Soviet Union from the same time period. Clearly, the Soviet influence went so deep that it determined basic aspects of residential life.
Alt-Marzahn is a direct shot on the tram to Mitte and Alexanderplatz, the main square of socialism in the capital socialist world’s most prosperous nation. The tram is slower than the S-Bahn but faster than the bus and travels down the middle of the street, so it is a good way to see the city while traveling between points. I first saw Alexanderplatz at night and, with the blocky, brightly-colored shopping centers lining it, there was once again that now-familiar eerie feeling. The area underneath the Fernsehturm is not a scary place in the dark, but it has much different atmosphere from the Kudamm, its counterpart in West Berlin. While the latter seems no different from Georgetown or Michigan Avenue, the former is definitely something from a totally different country. The 365-meter Fernsehturm towers over the area and can really be seen from all over the city. It was built under the Ulbricht regime in 1969 and reflects communism’s interest in things larger-than-life, but inefficient. The tower is tacky, no doubt, with its shiny sphere and the fact that it is much taller than anything else in the city. But with its height, it could be seen on both sides of the divided city.
Also in Alexanderplatz is the Universal Clock, which was built around the same time as the tower and adds to the area’s retro feel. I never used the underground public bathroom near the clock, per the recommendation of more than a few guidebooks that suggested it might be more appealing to those interested in the seedier side of Berlin.
Just as Brandenburg Gate seemed to be the rallying point for Germany for more than a century before World War II, Alexanderplatz was the same for the GDR during its existence. Ceremonies and dignitaries from the Eastern Bloc gathered there for years, but in the late 1980s, demonstrations for democratization were held there. Now the place does seem to have quieted down a bit, and is even a little depressing with its emptiness.
At the western edge of Alexanderplatz is another clear sign of the times gone by: a statue of Marx and Engels. It took a trip to the area in daylight to notice the monument on the edge of the river, just across the decaying Palast der Republik. Marx is one of Germany’s native sons and intellectuals, and tribute is still paid to him today with Karl-Marx-Allee, but the statue fits well with the public space dripping with ideology stretching from the tower to the edge of the Spree across from the palace.
The palace itself was one of the most disgusting buildings I saw in all of Berlin and was probably the building that summed up the Soviet influence the most. The giant building with copper-colored windows was built in the 1970s on the site of the Hohenzollern Palace, destroyed by the GDR after World War II. It is slated for demolition and there are controversial plans to rebuild the palace at a high cost, although there is a lot of nostalgia for the palace, which was one building East Germans could call their own and be proud of as a hall of the people. But when the government collapsed, so did the building. The place has been empty after asbestos removal in 1990 and is in clear disrepair. The former center of a powerful Soviet satellite is now a victim of Berlin counterculture’s graffiti. There is a dark mark on the building where the GDR hammer and sickle once was above the building’s entrance, but that symbol is gone, along with the Soviet economic and political structures that were forced on the country. Despite the repression many GDR residents experienced, I can understand the rise of ostalgie, especially considering how many of the symbols of their former country have been discarded. Maybe it would have been better to have demolished the Palast der Republik ten years ago when the country was first reunified; letting it rot in Mitte just makes it a daily reminder that the GDR was wiped clean from the new Germany. I cannot imagine being too happy to see the U.S. Capitol go into such disrepair if, say, this country collapsed and was absorbed by Canada.
After World War II, the Soviet Union installed a political and economic system in their half of Germany in mold of their own, and relics of this are seen in Alt-Marzahn and Alexanderplatz. But initially its forces were an occupying power and aimed to punish Germany and its people, now that part of the country was in their hands. Berliners were reminded everyday about the Third Reich’s transgressions and communism’s proud triumph over fascism. I did not see a single sign of remembrance for the Germans killed in the war, but there were frequent reminders that the Soviets were the first allied power to enter the capital in 1945. There is even a monument in West Berlin on Strasse des 17. Juni that the Red Army erected in the weeks between the German surrender and western Allies’ arrival in the city. But in East Berlin, the Soviet reminders are larger and more prevalent. After their long vendetta with Germany, during the time of the GDR, Soviets were sure to let East Berliners know that the Soviet Union was keeping a powerful watch over them.
The Soviet Memorial in Treptower Park is the greatest reminder of this fact. It was built a few years after the war and captures a chilling message about Stalin’s cult of personality and the Soviet obsession with its war victory. The entrance to the memorial along the street is a stone arch with words in Russian and German that read “Eternal Glory to the Heroes of the Red Army,” along with a few other similar lines. Pass through the arch to see the monument, which is about the size of a football field. At one end are to triangular slabs of red marble with a hammer and sickle at the point of each one; these were taken from the ruins of Hitler’s New Chancellery. At the other end, there is usually a colossal statue of a sword-wielding Soviet soldier crushing a swastika, but it was not there the afternoon I was. A man there said it was in Mecklenburg and did not know when it would be back, so that was disappointing, but reason enough to return to Berlin when the statue does. Between the statue and marble slabs are more than a dozen white marble blocks flanking the lawn, underneath which are buried 5,000 Red Army Soldiers who died in the battle for Berlin. The blocks on one side are in German, those on the other in Russian. Each one is engraved with a quote from Stalin, praising the heroes of the Red Army for their victories in various campaigns, and for the victory over fascism and the race-hate of the Hitlerites. On the other side of each block is a relief of a scene glorifying the Soviet Union, whether it be its army, its workers, its peasants, or leaders. The most interesting one depicted an infinitely long line of Red Army riflemen with a profile of Lenin looking on. It is a wonder the monument in Treptower Park is still standing, considering the vengeful message it sends. East Berliners suffered through subjugation from Moscow for decades and would have faced severe punishment for vandalizing the monument. But even now that they have self-determination, the memorial is still in good shape. Apparently Berliners did not act on the same lust for revenge the Soviets did when they began their occupation after the war.
People of the former East Berlin probably look back on the GDR days with mixed feelings; Marzahn, Alexanderplatz, and the Palast der Republik may bring about positive memories of the old days, while the totalitarian regime and overbearing reminders of their past from the Soviet Union have a darker meaning. But coming from the United States we have seem to experience our own bit of ostalgie. Just look at the Cold War souvenirs at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, a popular spot for U.S. tourists. Buy a GDR flag and a “ВЫ ВЫЕЖАЕТЕ ИЗ АМЕРИКАНСКОГО СЕКТОРА” T-shirt near where more than 40 years ago, East German border guards let a boy die from their shots. There is some kind of novelty about Cold War relics for us. I visited the Berlin I wanted to see, the mysterious place behind the Iron Curtain where throngs of people live in giant apartments and the weather was always foreboding. Some of this I actually saw, some of it I probably manufactured in my mind. For all the suffering the Soviet Union caused in the former GDR, one of its lasting influences seems to have hit people on both sides of the now-dismantled wall: ostaglie.
External Links
- Official Site of Berlin Transit
- Official Site of Berlin
- Checkpoint Charlie Museum
- IMDb.com: "Good Bye Lenin!"
Categories: All Memoirs | Germany | Berlin | Travels | Cold War | 2003
