06 "Berlin – Capital of the GDR"

The east part of the city was also hit by devastating war demolitions. The first designs for the reconstruction after 1945 were not yet shaped by the East-West opposition. The construction plans of a commission presided over by the architect Hans Scharoun saw repairs, new equipment and bold ground clearing ahead. East Berlin became the capital of the Soviet sector. The Soviet Embassy Unter den Linden was erected as one of the first large representative buildings, a model for the historical neo-classical representative DDR new builds. The new design of the Stalinallee in the 1950’s was then the attempt to implement this ideal in a large-scale. The capital of the DDR stood under pressure to achieve, and later enacted for itself a realistic architecture of socialism, which still, to a certain extent, brought into expression the tradition of Bauhause and the Weimar Republic. Between 1955 and 1970, within a phase of industrialisation of the building industry, the tendency towards industrialised builds with ready-made parts prevailed (prefabricated stab builds).