Germany Guide
Berlin
Karl-Marx-Allee
Friedrichshain's main road Karl-Marx-Allee, a vast boulevard lined with model 1950s and 1960s communist housing developments, was where the GDR Politbüro and Eastern Bloc dignitaries took the salute during the military parades. In September 1951, work began on turning this road into "Germany's first socialist street", by providing modern flats in the Zuckerbäckerstil (wedding-cake style), a mutated Classicism repeated across the Soviet bloc throughout the 1950s. Though the style was and is much derided in the West, the buildings were a well-thought-out and relatively soundly constructed attempt at housing that would live up to Berlin's great architectural tradition. The blocks begin south of U-Bahn Strausberger Platz, where the district of Friedrichshain begins, and where its worth getting off to walk east for ten minutes to Café Sybille, Karl-Marx-Allee 72, a stylish, minimalist café that's a pleasant stop in its own right but also has a worthwhile little exhibition on the history of the street. The buildings were to be "palaces for workers, not American eggboxes", and architectural plans were shipped direct from the USSR. From then on it was all about model workers putting in overtime and even donating a portion of their wages to see the project through. A lucky few even got to live in the apartments, but these were mostly for the well connected.