 RUSSIA IN FACTS |
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01 March 2003 00:53
Luxury living, Stalin style: A former playground of communist party loyalists, the grandiose Berlin street once known as Stalinallee has again become one of the city's most fashionable addresses.Nora FitzGerald reports
No place is more emblematic of East Germany'sduelling memories than
Berlin's Karl-Marx Allee, born Stalinallee 50 years ago this month.
To many, the grandiose boulevard was a street populated by privileged
communist party loyalists and Stasi secret police officials who enjoyed a
civilised life in post-war East Berlin while others still lived in blown-out
apartments with no electricity.
Workers carved a six-lane canyon out of the rubble and built grand buildings
ideal for watching parades.
The socialist realist architecture rose up out of the hands of East Berlin
workers like a wedding cake to the communist dream.
Fifteen thousand people, many of them workers and not all of them party
members, moved in to the first 2,700 flats in 1953. Historians like to note
that the ornamental tiles, in some kind of foretelling, began to peel off
right away.
Ten years ago, the street was in utter disrepair. Today, the former
Stalinallee is a very trendy address again.
"This is a really cool, very fashionable address again and young people
like to live here," says Lidia Tirri, curator for the exhibit "Life
Behind the Facade", a compilation of oral histories and photos of
modest, pristine apartments on Karl-Marx Allee.
But instead of the Cafe Moskau, there is now a garage-sized Mexican
restaurant and the former official cinema is now a gay bar where a man
dressed as Jackie Onassis greets guests at the door as techno music wafts on
to the broad street.
There is not much mixing between the elderly "genossen", the German
word for comrade, and the hip urbanites who live or frequent Karl-Marx Allee.
But the formally dressed old guard has learned to tolerate the dyed hair and
body piercing without much suspicion, Tirri said, especially if the youths
say they are from the East.
Edith Glaser is 84 and has time for memories. Her Karl-Marx Allee flat is
quite modest by new standards. Most of the one-bedroom flat remains as it was
in 1953, with original furnishings and fringed lamps.
Her Singer sewing machine, hidden from the authorities who confiscated all
sewing machines after the war, has a special place of honour. She says she
was never a good Communist, even though her husband was a member of the
party's central committee.
Still, Glaser prefers the former times, because life was simpler.
"Things have been made worse by the west," she says. "I never
travelled farther than the Baltic. Now people want everything the west can
bring but all the small stores have died out and the people are out of
work."
Located on the street is the Karl Marx Bookstore, also half a century old.
One of the more popular items sold here is not The Communist Manifesto, but a
board game called Stalinallee, a smoke and mirrors form of Monopoly. Players
try to win a coveted Stalinallee apartment, except the rules keep changing.
"You play more on instinct than logic," says Erich Kundel,
bookstore owner and creator of the board game. Cards give players choices of
becoming informants (move ahead) or dissidents (move back) to win their
apartment.
"There are different perceptions of reality on this street," says
Kundel, sipping coffee at the nearby Cafe Sybille. "People who
didn't live here have a distance on this street . .. The people who
lived here knew the rules and how to play the game. Some were middle
management - in the party, Stasi, army. But even they could never be sure
they were doing the right thing."
Some of the residents Tirri interviewed for the exhibit remember the
excitement of a new apartment, the good times and low rents, starting at 48
East German Deutschemarks. Others recall the peculiar anxieties of life under
the old system, like when the street became Karl-Marx Allee after Stalin,
then dead, was disgraced. One night in 1961, the Stalin monument disappeared.
"I was afraid to go out on the street because the police were
there," says Charitas Urbanski, an elderly resident recalling the day
the monument vanished and the street took on a new name.
The foreboding, modernist Stasi complex built in 1961 is only a brisk walk
away from the famous street where numerous secret police officials lived.
"Not everyone who lived on (Karl-Marx Allee) was a high-ranking
official," says Joerg Drieselmann, managing director of the Stasi
complex, now a museum and memorial site. "People like the milkman and
the bricklayer were also awarded apartments for good work."
Drieselmann spends his days preserving relics of communist terror and high
paranoia.
A native of Erfurt, Drieselmann did not live the ordered life of the comrade
on Stalinallee nearby.
He was sent to prison for four years with six friends for distributing flyers
protesting the imprisonment of Russian writer and dissident Alexander
Solzhenitsyn.
"You have to remember what took place on this street," Drieselmann
says. "People who had nothing after the war built with a powerful
motivation that was very honest. But by the 1980s, the street was in utter
disrepair and it took the unified German state to restore it."
No one included in the exhibit "Life Behind the Facade", recalled
spying, being spied on or being afraid. Most remember the beauty of their
first kitchen and long evenings with friends. Many "Ossies", or
Easterners, have a clear case of Ostalgie - a longing for the former times,
including the young people who come to live on Karl-Marx Allee.
"When I am asked about Ostalgie I am reminded of a joke," says
Drieselmann. "A grandson asks his grandfather if he would rather live in
the roll-up-your-sleeves socialism of the 1950s or the wolf society of
capitalism in the 90s, and the grandfather says, 'Socialism, of
course'. When the grandson asks why, he answers, 'The women were
younger then.'"
[FTI [The Financial Times]] |
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