Berlin Karl Marx Allee Strausberger Platz (#2539)

My next stop that day was to spend some time wandering along Karl-Marx-Allee (named Stalinallee during the East German rule.)

My reaction on coming out of the Strausberger Platz u-bahn station was surprise. Having been raised with the American Cold War messaging from the late 1950's on, I expected very simple, functional, alienating architecture that would appear to be similar to what we were building for public housing during that era. I did not at all expect to see massive projects of housing for workers built with an attention to detail and scale that, though monumentalist, looked inviting.

Admittedly the street was designed to be a showcase for the GDR, but considering the volume of housing built, it clearly provided a nice (architecturally) residential area for a large number of citizens. Though it has now been quite some time since unification, the details and pictures from the area when it was East Berlin (link below) suggest that what I was seeing now in terms of the architecture is not materially very different from what it was like before reunification.

The contradictions to expectations seen on this visit to Karl-Marx-Allee, in my second week of explorations, was instrumental in my beginning to reflect on the extent of American propaganda on its own citizens during the Cold War. That our images of Germany, East Germany, and Communism were reduced to simple and inaccurate stereotypes so as to manipulate public opinion, without giving the public the credit for being able to sort out the available information. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-Marx-Allee