One of the curiosities of the GDR at the end of the 1950s was that despite the immense prestige the ruling SED party attached to the reconstruction of Berlin, very little had been actually accomplished. This was emblematic of the wider failures of the GDR's housing policies in which reconstruction was often sluggish and many buildings were often dilapidated. Although the state trumpeted its accomplishments in housing its citizens in various speeches and proclamations in the state media, the reality was that there was an acute shortage of housing and the situation would have been even more severe in the 1950s had there not been a steady exodus of the GDR population to the much more prosperous FRG. Although it is tempting to pin the blame for this failure on Soviet rapacity and vengeance, the responsibility of the GDR's "Friends" (as the Sovies were colloquially termed by the SED) on the SED housing policy was only one factor at play. Berlin itself represented a microcosm of a housing and reconstruction policy that failed for a variety of reasons ranging from overambitious plans to the skewed priorities of the SED state.

In the immediate postwar period, the SED leadership as well as the Soviet military occupation authorities recognized the symbolic importance of Berlin. The first German postwar press of the KPD were headquartered in Berlin and the announcement of the amalgamation of the various socialist parties under KPD leadership thus forming the SED took place in Berlin. For its part, the heads of the Soviet military government (SVAG) were caught between a dilemma of trying to balance Moscow's calls for more German reparations and the need to foster a strong occupation that would restructure the emerging Eastern zone into a bulwark for socialism. SED celebrations of the centennial of the 1848 revolutions tried to place their historical focal point at the barricade fighting in Berlin, and not in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt am Main as seen in this poster which contrasts the bourgeois Paulskirche as weak and anemic compared to the city's healthy expression of revolutionary outrage.

The SED leadership recognized that actual reconstruction of Berlin was more important than rhetoric as the lines of the Cold War hardened and Berlin became one of its first ideological battlegrounds. SED General Secretary Walter Ulbricht announced with great fanfare that the city would be reconstructed into a modern utopia that would reflect the ideals of the GDR. The SED Central Committee's official announcement in 1951 laid out the ambitions of the plan:

The new Berlin will grow out of the old Berlin. In the new buildings, a modern equivalent must be found for that which is valuable in our tradition, that which shows the highest cultural development of our people. We want a national, German style of architecture, one that is derived from the great masters of German building history. Therefore, German architects will have successfully completed their duty only when they build in a style that is national, beautiful, and grand.

But what the SED discovered was that while it was easy to trumpet these plans, accomplishing them was another matter entirely. For example, although a "national, German style" seemed easy to accomplish, many of the GDR's architects had difficulty in meeting this goal. The natural architectural style for many German architects was the Bauhaus, which seemingly had established its anti-fascist credentials via its suppression under the Third Reich. But the SED leadership found the Bauhaus too closely associated with "bourgeois formalism." There were attacks on the Bauhaus both in state media like Neues Deutschland and the newly formed and centrally managed the architectural institute, the Deutsche Bauakademie.

In their attack on the Bauhaus, the SED had the assistance of the Soviets. after a brief period of experimentation in the 1920s, Soviet architecture had rejected Constructivist modernist architecture like the Bauhaus and by the postwar period, Stalinist architecture had devolved into a curious mishmash of neoclassical forms, modern building materials, and monumentalism. The Soviet input was vital in shaping the "Sixteen Principles of Urban Planning" which the GDR put into its national building laws in 1950 and it became an inconsistent lodestone for GDR urban planners as the SED used it to castigate bad designs while giving no clear direction as to what exactly constituted a modern proletarian city that honored historical precepts. Ulbricht, for example, would critique modernist designs as "American boxes," and "Hitler-esque barracks," bu also wanted the buildings for Berlin to be unique and have a sound historical base.

The centerpiece of the SED's reconstruction campaign for Berlin was the Stalinalle in the Friedrichshain and Mitte districts of the city. The SED's contradictory process of selection and adaptation architectural designs gradually coalesced into a style the state deemed "socialist-realist" that was a fusion of modern construction techniques and a grandiose neoclassical style which integrated massive apartment blocks, wide boulevards, and various symbols of state power. The plan for the Stalinalleewas to create a fully-integrated urban space that harmoniously fused living space, recreation, and state facilities into a single unit. The SED launched the Stalinallee with great fanfare in 1951 and promoted various schemes for its citizens to invest and pitch in to gain a privileged spot in Stalinalle when th project was completed.

These various schemes on the part of the SED underscored another fatal weakness of the SED's early attempts at urban reconstruction: resources. The GDR was chronically short of material and trained workers to accomplish the gargantuan tasks that Ulbricht prioritized. The reconstruction of Berlin was part of Ulbricht's wider schema of Aufbau des Sozialismus in which the state sought to swiftly reorganize and reconstruct the GDR into a modern socialist state. In practice, this meant stripping resources the consumer goods industry, which was already underfunded and under performing, to grandiose project like the Stalinallee. The SED called upon workers to sacrifice ore to build socialism, but these workers were increasingly building monuments to state power as the construction of living spaces and other amenities increasingly fell behind schedule. Ironically, but not surprisingly, the 1953 GDR revolts actually started in the unfinished Stalinallee as worker strikes and other unrest mushroomed into a wider attack on the SED and its Aufbau des Sozialismus. Many of the Stalinallee protests mocked the SED's self-aggrandizing rhetoric and performances when inaugurating the project in 1951. Although the NVA was able to clamp down on the protests both in Berlin and the rest of the country, the plans for Berlin's reconstruction were yet further delayed.

For his part, Ulbricht was lucky in the timing of the 1953 revolts as the leadership circle of the USSR post-Stalin sought to blame the German uprising on Beria. Ulbricht's Aufbau des Sozialismus campaign had made him many enemies within the SED and his harsh and hardline personality was somewhat out of step with the new course that Khrushchev wanted out of the Eastern bloc. The Stalinallee was renamed Karl-Marx-Allee, but the grandiose ideas of Ulbricht's socialist-realist city remained in limbo. Khrushchev disliked the grand boulevards of urban design and favored the more modern and efficient slab-architecture of rebar and concrete. Ulbricht, somewhat chastened by the 1953 revolt, adapted this style of construction to help rebuild the city quickly and with much less resources.

The general failure to rebuild East Berlin in 1950s had multiple causes and was not just the consequence of the GDR's "friends." The Soviet role in this rather sorry affair was often quite indirect; Ulbricht and the SED had a number of preexisting Stalinist architectural precepts that they could wield as a club to ensure that urban designers hewed to the giganticist monumentalism that reflected the SED's own power. The importance of the Soviets in propping Ulbricht up often masked the degree to which the SED leadership was actually responsible for the many hardships the GDR citizenship faced during the 1950s. The SED tried in this period to accomplish a Stalinist urban reconstruction without the equivalent resources the Soviet dictatorship had at its disposal. Even in the Soviet case, massive urban construction often came at the expense of the consumer economy and relied upon forced labor in some cases. In trying build a socialist urban utopia that would embellish the image of the SED-run state on such limited resources, Ulbricht guaranteed the GDR's urban reconstruction would achieve neither.

Sources

Diefendorf, Jeffry M. Rebuilding Europe's Bombed Cities. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.

_.In the Wake of War The Reconstruction of German Cities After World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Harrison, Hope Millard. Driving the Soviets Up the Wall Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Pugh, Emily. The Berlin Wall and the Urban Space and Experience of East and West Berlin, 1961-1989. 2008.

Swett, Pamela E., S. Jonathan Wiesen, and Jonathan R. Zatlin. Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth-Century Germany. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.