East german utopia!

Let's go behind the wall again! Behind the wall, on the eastern side, everything was modern, wonderful and just built yesterday! The only trouble living here was the struggle between choosing between the newly built roads when taking your new Trabi out or selecting which of all coffeehouses or restaurants at the newly built centre houses to visit. At least this was the image the GDR government wanted to give when printing post cards.

Just as a major part of the post cards from West Berlin shows the wall the ones from the East Berlin shows arranged and fictionally beautiful scenes from the socialist utopia. This was the picture they wanted people receiving the post cards to see. As we all know the real life in the GDR was something different, something never shown on post cards.

This time we see nice scenes from the Interhotel at Unter den Linden, Schönhauser Alle, the youth club Greifswalder Straße, the Friedrichstraße train station and Rathausstraße:

Of the buildings on this post card the Interhotel at Unter den Linden is, as far as I know, demolished. This hotel was located in the corner of Friedrichstraße and Unter den Linden.

The night shot from Schönhauser Allee is from a place up in Prenzlauer Berg. The house on the picture is unfortunately blurred on Google Maps. This is unfortunately a common problem in Germany. House owners tend to think that a snapshot of their house facade on Google maps hurts their personal integrity and they request Google to blur it. The result can be seen below.



Larger map

The Jugendklub (youth club) on Greifswalder Straße is no more. You can see a picture on how it looked before it was torn down on Flickr.

The Friedrichstraße station still exists and is one of the more busy train stations in the eastern parts as it has both S-Bahn and U-Bahn lines. The station now looks like this:


Larger map

The only of the houses built during the GDR time that still stands is the big complex at Rathausstraße. This house stands just by the TV tower at Alexanderplatz, neighbor to the Rotes Rathaus (the Berlin city hall):


Larger map

The back side is unwritten:

I hope you liked this little trip through the GDR utopia! Interestingly two out of three of the houses built from that era are now torn down. I guess that was never the plan when they took that fancy photo of happy people outside the youth club or that photo of the fancy concrete hotel at Unter den Linden.

Wall Riders

Not all of my post cards are gray and full of barb wire. Today I'll show something slightly more positive. This card is sent 1990 and the wall is no longer called an "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart" and it is no longer used to keep people from fleeing the GDR. On the picture below people are riding the wall for fun and to look over the border. This would have been totally unacceptable some years earlier. The western citizens had towers and other spots where they could glimpse over the wall, but not like this.

The card is called "Mauerreiter", german for "wall riders". The text also says "so gefällt's uns besser!", which means something like "like this we like better".

Unfortunately I can not find out where the photo is taken. Maybe someone reading this can help?

The card is sent to Sweden, to the city Helsingborg.

The text says, translated from swedish:

Dear both of you!

We have nice days here in Berlin. Today we have hacked on the wall and gone through a historical museum. East Germany still differed a lot from west. Tomorrow we will travel back home again. Tack care! Hugs /[some name i can not decipher, maybe Karin]

Dear Lennart...

It is time for one of the most interesting post cards I have in my collection! This time it is not that much about the front of the card, but the message written on the back. It is a post card sent from a man named Klaus, in the former GDR, to a man called Lennart, likely living in Sweden.

The front of the card is a typical GDR card, with old and new architecture:

The pictures are, from top left and down:

• The Unter den Linden memorial "Neue Wache". Originally built as a guard house for the troops of the crown prince of Prussia. Used as a war memorial since 1931.
• Ernst-Thälmann-Park
• Rathausstrasse
• Biergarten at Spittelmarkt
• Märkisches Ufer

The back of the card contains a long written message with lots of details about the thoughts of a man named Klaus, living in the GDR, at the very end of the lifetime of that country. The card is dated 4/3 1989, just some half year before the wall came down. It involves thoughts about the rapid political changes in the USSR and other former communist states. The card was sent to his friend Lennart. This is a typically Swedish name, so I assume it was sent to Sweden.

The card was likely sent in an envelope, as it has no visible address or stamp.

If you have problems reading the text, here is a transcript. I have tried to keep the original spelling.

Dear Lennart,
Thank you very much for your letter. I'm very glad.
I see it has also some advantage to live in the GDR. I have not such a trouble with my flat. It is quite cheap (106.- Mark p. month) I with you that you find a good new flat.
It is interesting to read that you have visited a mine. Would you work as a miner? It is not a very hard work? 
It is interesting to read, that you don't like the policy if Gorbatchow. Can you say me some reasons more for your oppinion? I think he is a clever man, but he has a long way to get success. The economical situation becomes not better in the USSR. And this is terrible. If Gorbatchow want to be successful, then he needs the economical development. The democracy alone and the right to say the truth is not enough. What do you think about the situation in Afghanistan and Paraguay? Do you see a future there?
Dear Lennart I have a request. Could you send me the record "The Lion and the Cobra" by Sinead O'Connor? I could send you a record from here too or a book. Ok? Please write soon my dear friend.
Best wishes Klaus

It amazes me that there could be so much thoughts and information at just one side of a post card! I really wish Klaus got the Sinead O'Connor record! I hope Lennart wrote back! I wonder what their previous and later conversations was about?

If someone out there have any idea about who Lennart and Klaus might be, please tell me! I would be very happy to find out more. I guess it would be almost impossible to find an email address to them now, 24 years later, but it would be very interesting to write to them now, to see if they have any thoughts about the historical changes after their post card.

Here follows some views from the post card, as they look today.

Neue Wache

Larger map

Ernst-Thälmann-Park

Larger map

Rathausstraße

Larger map

Spittelmarkt

Larger map

Märksiches Ufer

Visa större karta

I hope you found this card as interesting as I do!

Potsdamer Platz

Time to go black and white again. This time we will head over to Potsdamer Platz, one of the most sad examples of the destruction of Berlin. Before the war this used to be one of the liveliest places in Berlin. It was an important public square and a major traffic intersection. It had lots of shops and houses. Potsdamer Platz is located about 1 km (1,100 yd) south of the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag (German Parliament Building), and close to the southeast corner of the Tiergarten park. It is named after the city of Potsdam, some 25 km (16 mi) to the south west, and marks the point where the old road from Potsdam passed through the city wall of Berlin at the Potsdam Gate.

The allied bombings were heavy here. Potsdamer Platz was more or less completely ruined. After the war it was left desolate and later on the Berlin wall stretched through the area. Large no mans land areas stretched through the area.

As you can see the area is wide open and torn apart by the wall. The old style house to the upper left is the side of the state parliament of Berlin (Abgeordnetenhaus) that I have written about in an older post.

Here you can see roughly the same area today, on Google Maps:

Show larger map

Below you can see an old picture of how Potsdamer Platz could look like before the destuction:

Potsdamer Platz is now rebuilt, with several houses with interesting modern architecture. The place has again become an important traffic intersection and where the wall once tore the place apart there are now again people and shops. 

Below you can see the Sony Center house from below and night time.

And finally the back side of the card:

Meanwhile in the GDR

All posts this far has been about post cards from West Germany. Few - if any - post cards from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) showed the wall or the brutally divided city. What did the post cards from the GDR show then? Of course they showed the success, the progression, the architecture and the happiness in the young socialist state. The pictures where taken from locations not far from the western ones, sometimes from just the other side of the wall, but still they are completely different.

On the above picture you can see classical buildings mixed with new ones. 

• The first picture, at the upper left, shows a scene from the buildings around Unter den Linden. Classical architecture was not directly correct according to communist ideas, but they were built by workers and the efforts of those were celebrated. The buildings are a bit younger than they look, mainly built during the late 1700:s and the 1800:s.
• To the upper right you have the Palast der Republik, the huge parliament building of GDR. The building was erected between 1973 and 1976 and housed the parliament, a concert hall, restaurant, and much more. It was finally demolished 2008 to make room for a rebuilt Stadtschloss. I will likely spend a complete blog post about this sole building one day.
• To the lower left there is a picture of the Spreepark. It opened 1969 as Kulturpark Plänterwld. It was an amusement park where the citizens of the GDR could amuse themselves for a while. It was the only constant amusement park in the GDR. The park continued to be open after the unification but was closed around 2001 due to economical problems. It can be visited by guided groups at restricted times.
• To the lower right we see Rotes Rathaus and Fernsehturm, the TV tower. Behind Rotes Rathaus is Alexanderplatz. This place, together with the Stalinallé, was built to brag about. In my collection of post cards from the divided Berlin I have huge amounts of cards with various motives around here. The Alexanderplatz area was really dull when the wall came down, but nowadays it has bloomed to one of the more interesting ones in Berlin and the TV tower is still very cool in its futuristic pride.

The back side is unwritten.

If you like my blog posts, please share them to your friends! It would make me really happy to see more people finding the blog!

[Aftonbladet] [DN-norrsken]

Wall stays another 100 years

In my previous post I showed a card where Walter Ulbricht said that there would be no wall. The wall was built less than two months after he said that at a press conference. Today we will see what his successor, Erich Honecker, says about the wall.

The card from is from the same place as my previous post about Sebastianstrasse. The new thing here is the news paper clip in the upper right part.

The clip is part of the post card, not something glued on top. The quote from Honecker says: "Wall stays another 100 years". Luckily Honecker was wrong. The newspaper was printed 20 January 1989. Honecker resigned as general of the state on 18 October 1989, succeeded by Egon Krenz. The border passages was opened on that tense night of 9 November 1989 and the wall was physically removed during 1990. 

The back side is unwritten.

[Sveriges Radio 1] [Sveriges Radio 2] [DN]

No one has the intention to erect a wall!

This time we'll take a look at a grand political betrayal. Let's start with the post card. The big quote at the bottom says: No one has the intention to erect a wall!

This post card pictures Walter Ulbricht, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the German Democratic Republic between 25 July 1950 – 3 May 1971. This means that he ruled GDR during the time when the wall was erected, starting at 13 August 1961.

The post card contains a quote from Walter Ulbricht, from the magazine Neues Deutschland (new Germany). Translated the quote says:

"I understand your question as, that there are people in West Germany, who wish, that we mobilize the construction workers of the capital of the GDR, to erect a wall. To me it is not known, that such an intention exists. The construction workers of our capital occupy themselves mainly with building of apartments, and our manpower is for this fully deployed."

This was said by Walter Ulbricht at an international press conference the 15 June 1961. The wall construction was started less than two months later.

It is a bit amusing how Ulbricht, in the first sentence, turns it as it was the west germans that wanted a wall. As we now all know the wall was built to keep the GDR citizens inside GDR. It was built to stop large amounts of GDR citizens from escaping to West Germany.

There is a very interesting video clip from the mentioned press conference at YouTube:

The back side is unwritten.

In my next post I will follow this post card up with a related one, again with a quote. That time it will be from the successor, Erich Honecker.