Berlin Ecke

In Case You’re Wondering...

...what Ost-Berlin Mitte looked like in the 80’s, it looked like Ost-Berlin Mitte in the 50’s. That is, if you just scratched the surface and got away from the Potemkin village near the Fernsehturm.

East Berlin, 1969

Fragmentary images.

A Cold War Radio Fragment

Radio Berlin International (DDR) - circa 1981

Jammin' 'til the Break of Dawn

One can easily forget how it was not that long ago that transmitting honest news was a hard thing to do, and that people in oppressive states had to rely on word of mouth to find out what was going on in the world. One always had to suspect that there was falsehood in it as well.

Mapping the Wall

Home movies made by Peter Guba from 1959-62 when he was an East German border soldier can be seen online at the website of the Deutsche Historiches Museum. Oneonly wonders how he got away with it.

Es ist zum Kotzen

In the early 1980s on the imaginary political frontline of the cold war, desperation was ripe. The western left wanted to disarm unilaterally, just to get the voices out of their heads. Common sense prevailed, and the resolute were victorius.

Looking back, the bleatings and howlings of the fearful seem pathetic, as their only best option was to maintain the status quo that imprisoned hundreds of millions of people east of the “Antifaschistische Schutzmauer”

Pretentious Crap, circa 1988

"Halb-Stadt" (Berlin West)

Where exactly DOES Art-Haus rubbish go when it dies?

From the Wonderful World of Persuasion, DDR Style

Permit me to present an excerpt from a 1981 East German publication for agitators. It was meant to give small-time propagandists who were supposed to work the barracks, the factory floor, and the like, examples of successful preaching to the imprisoned.

One choise piece provides an example of the limits of truthiness:

Italy: What are the Causes of Terrorist Actions?

The new year began in Italy as the old one had ended: with terrorist actions. On 31 December, Police General Enrico Calvaligi was shot at the front door of his home. In January, the kidnapping of Judge Giovanni D’Urso occupied public attention until he was a released. These were only the latest in a long chain of events that began on 12 December 1969 with a bomb at the Agricultural Bank in Milan and reached its high point so far on Bologna on 2 August 1980 when 85 people were killed and more than 200 injured. What are the causes of these terrorist actions, which have affected Italy in particular, but also other capitalist countries?

Bourgeois and social reformist ideologists and politicians generally, reject the claim that the roots are in the capitalist system. Explaining the causes, however, requires considering the whole interrelated complex of objective and subjective of economic, social, political, and ideological factors, and they develop from the nature of the capitalist system!

In the socio-economic area, terrorism is bred complex of factors of new and old contradictions, in the backwardness of the south, and particularly the sharpness of the economic crisis and its results. The inflation rate in 1980 was above 20 percent throughout the year, at the top of the leading capitalist states, and unemployment according to official figures remained at about 1.7 million, about 50 percent of whom are young people. In a situation of general uncertainty, extremist and anarchist ideas spread among dissatisfied and politically immature young people who want revenge on the bourgeois state. In this milieu, adventurers find an audience for their calls for “direct action” and terrorist acts, which they claim are the quickest path to social change. The crisis is also hard on the middle class, and produces not only anti-monopolistic views, but also radical views to the right and the “left.” Demagogic appeals to national sentiments, or to economic and social difficulties and social problems, allow neo-fascist and “leftist” extremist groups to win supporters in various social levels — from the poorest farmers in the south to some tradesmen, businessmen, civil servants, and students.

The two were, of course, kidnapped by the Red Brigade, well known for their “right wing views” to the East German listener of this bromide, and who were trained, plosletyzed to, and funded by the intelligence agencies of the Warsaw pact,making the entire thing a “Daddy drinks because you cry” type of argument.

September 11th (1989)

While Le Monde has for several years made smug references to “the real tragedy of September 11th”, which they always imply to be the anniversary of the coup against Salvador Allende, they overlook mourning over another tragic event in their beloved world view: 11-September-1989. Ouai, quelle misère!



What the present day hard left are sentimental about: a grim autocracy
that they never lived under, and don’t understand.

The Hungarian government decided that they would open their border to Austria, taking down their barbed wire section of the Iron Curtain . It permitted east block citizens to simply “walk off the rez” to freedom and away from Marxist-Leninism. Never mind the Marxist-Leninist sympathies they were stepping straight into, and how the failure of Communism would undercut their control fantasies about man, or delusions that in Socialism there is freedom. Morons.
Ordinary Berliners on both sides of the now-derelict Wall were certainly excited over the prospect of unity, but the city's opinion-makers were often blase or even hostile toward the project. It became fashionable among the leftist intelligentsia of West Berlin to condemn the easterners' longing for unification as a lamentable submission to the lure of Western materialism.

- ”Berlin”, David Clay Large

And if the ideology of the present day “peace camp”, “Solidarity” movements from unrelated people afar, and their sympathists who pretend to be on the sign of human decency and freedom doesn’t sound familiar, this kind of thing might make them feel warm and right at home in the paradise of ”the workers’ and peasants’ state”

East Berlin itself had three Stasi prisons, each of them a hellhole where torture was a regular part of the "reeducation" process. In a report on his incarceration at Berlin-Pankow and Rummelsburg in the early 1970s, Timo Zilli, an Italian-born socialist, described a regimen of daily beatings, weeks of solitary confinement in a windowless cell, and hours of being hanged by his wrists with his feet barely touching the floor. A Jewish prisoner in Pankow who had spent five years in a Nazi concentration camp made the mistake of addressing his guards as "SS-Gestapo" and giving them the Hitler salute. As the guards beat him senseless, they shouted: "You Jewish swine think you can put on such a show because the Nazis let you survive.... We'll finish the job."

Obviously they travelled through time, since all of it must have been inspired by Gitmo. After all, mankind knew no cruelty before 2002.

Today in History

4 May 1971

East Berlin Chief Quits

Walter Ulbricht, the Stalin of East Germany and Architect of the Berlin Wall resigned Monday as head of the Communist party because of age. He is 77. In east Berlin, antoher headliner, Erich Honecker, 58, was named to succeed Ulbricht as first secretary. Ulbricht is the senior Communist party leader in the Soviet Bloc.

Beauty Feeling That There Might be Nothing to Live for

Unplacability in time is a theme often resorted to, as is the co-placement of contradictions: young and decayed, soft and rough. It asks itself when the missiles are coming.

Look Ma, No Commies!

Spiegel Online has a gallery of before and after photos of buildings and places in the Former East Germany. Much as it is that the word “utopia” actually means nowhere, collectivism means “it’s no-ones’”.

The Near Distant Ago Becomes Even More Distant

Slab Magazine, a journal of Architectural fixations sums it up best in review of new work and urbanism is what used to be the death strip between the two Berlins:

Floating Further out into the Cultural Vacuum

Everything looked clean and new and in a certain sense no less reflective than the polished glass of the new building’s curtain walls. In a world of Photoshop effects, smoothing filters, color balancing and corrected saturation, it seems there’s an irresistable drive to create a world in the image of the image.

Which in reflection, seems as unreal as the DDR's Potemkin villages, or West Berlin's Architectural social experiments.

People use the metaphor of a desert to describe a place -or a state- in which you feel empty or placeless, but my childhood in New Mexico gave me a sense for the richness of life to be found there. At HPI I felt a truer form of emptiness, and now I wonder why I became so transfixed by the polished reflections of the new learning and research center. They seemed to have a cathartic effect, somehow canceling the irritation I’d felt from sustained exposure to high levels of bogusness traversing the vicissitudes of The New Death Strip . To just look away entirely, straight into the sky or towards the rail line or a group of trees outside the campus’s border, seemed like the denial

Please note that I called it TWO Berlins, as it really DID diverge culturally into two cities and two cultures.