Back in the DDR

The one thing I’ve learnt about Berlin weather is that it seems to do something different every day.  Sometimes it even seems as though we get ‘four seasons in one day’.  This week, however, has been consistent – cold but dry and still and sunny – perfect for an urban ramble.  Yesterday we turned out of the flat and headed along Prenzlauer Allee into DDR territory – blocks of Cold-War era housing and even the odd Trabi to be spotted.  I love walking in this part of Prenzlauer Berg – it’s so different from the unrelenting prettiness of areas such as Kollwitzplatz, with its ubiquitous middle-class parents and its twee little shops selling overpriced stuff that absolutely no one can have any need of.  The buildings further out are built with utility rather than beauty as the main concern and the shops are more functional – bakeries and bike repairs for example.  It’s more like I imagine the DDR to have been before it was invaded by (sorry, ‘reunited with’) West Germany.  After an hour or so’s wandering we eventually came to the bridge at Bornholmer Strasse.  We last came here on the 9^th November – the 24^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  To see traffic hurtling across into Wedding now it’s difficult to believe that this was once an international frontier.  I don’t believe that walls should separate people, I don’t believe in barriers of any kind, physical or ideological, but I fear that modern Germany is doing its best to erase the old East.  I worry that monuments such as the memorial to Ernst Thälmann (a socialist leader murdered by the Nazis) in the park that bears his name will disappear.  There are already plans to ‘develop’ the park by building yuppie homes in the place of flats that were once occupied by DDR officials.

I’m not defending the surveillance practices of the Stasi (even though they were only doing what the ‘land of the free’ does routinely all the time, i.e. spying on everyone and justifying it as being in the interests of national security), I just believe that capitalism is the great evil, and the capitalist world, with its injustice, its inequality, its corruption and the weight of the establishment-friendly media behind it has done its best to try to convince us all that socialism is bad.

Atmospheric Soviet-era architecture

Trabi!