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.
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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:
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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):
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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.
