The Marx-Engels-Forum in Berlin, Germany occupies a complex site that reflects both upon historical development and envisioned future changes. Located on the Eastern side of the Spree River, near Schinkel’s former Lustgarten, the forum is a somber green space that divides itself from the concrete grid through its interruption by a light belt of trees. Within the Marx-Engels-Forum are a number of public sculptures, the residue of the former German Democratic Republic. These public artworks convey a series of messages both from the former GDR and the contemporary governing body; first through their production and secondly through their preservation. While the memories these sculptures evoke often reinvigorate an East German cultural legacy, the forum itself is a surprising remainder from a regime whose traces are being increasingly removed1 in a program of urban revitalization and through the production of a new German identity.
The process of establishing a coherent system of development for the postwar Berlin with the unstable desires of the GDR proved to be difficult but is illustrated through both the conception and then realization of the Marx-Engels-Forum. Postwar Berlin was concerned both with the construction of new housing and the construction of a new modern socialist identity through the development of its city center. (Diedendorf 191-2) After the second World War a high percentage of Berlin had been destroyed2, including both citizens of the city and the built environment itself. This situation created a tense atmosphere for a newly founded democratic republic but contributed to a prioritization of public housing projects over monumental architecture and republic novelties.
When examining the history of urbanism in Berlin after the war, the GDR’S discplined dedication to public housing over republic monumentality is apparent. There are of course dramatic changes in design and plan of these projects, but these alterations reflect larger political struggles related to national identity and are not so much related to the postponement of housing development. This project is characterized by a dramatic shift in style that illustrates the sobering of political tendencies, a symptom of the ebb and flow of political leaders in office. The Karl-Marx-Allee, formerly the Frankfurter Allee and then the Stalinallee, provides a legible history for understanding the changes within urban planning while also providing the basis for a situated understanding of the Marx-Engels-Forum.
Where will the workers live?
In the 1950s while under the leadership of Walter Ulbricht, an architectural and urban language was provided through the importation of Soviet Neoclassicism3. The common heritage of this language was developed when the GDR sent a group of architects and urbanists to the Soviet Union to learn the current Socialist design methods. The result of this trip was the “Sixteen Principles for the Restructuring of Cities” published by the GDR and devoted to a type of anti-Modernism, refocusing on the city center and the place of the worker within the city. Both the program and language were essentially hegemonic tendencies placed upon the GDR as part of an integration with the USSR. The outcome of these new urbanist guidelines can be read through the semiotics of Karl-Marx-Allee.
The construction and design of Karl-Marx-Allee was captive to at least two goals which included the production of a new modern socialist identity and the provision of much needed housing. To create this new modern socialist identity, the planning and design guidelines of the “Sixteen Planning Principles…” were utilized (Diedendorf). The effect was of a Neoclassic monumentality, reflecting the progress of the East Germans and their new Socialist republic while also breaking from traditional planning by integrating mixed uses throughout the street. This incorporation of housing is key as it pronounces the combination of nationalism with the really existing needs of the republic, providing a German socialist program. It was not only that the GDR planners and administration were creating a public building that would reflect the progress of the GDR and consecrate any claims of national identity, rather Karl-Marx-Allee is a testament of the GDR’s ability to combine nationalist projects with the needs of the republic.
The Marx-Engels-Allee operates in such a way that it defines a period of GDR planning through both its architectural language and designates the desires of a political network. The impact of this is a permanence, one that persists as a remainder of planning linked with inefficiency and totalitarian practice. Largely this persistence is entangled with the memories of Stalin. While the avenue was celebrated, and is still a formal aspect of central Berlin, there is no ability to divest the meaning associated with this simulation of Soviet Neoclassicism. Its inefficiencies are regularly found within the level of detail required by the language of Neoclassicism and materials usage in construction, two traits considered unacceptable for meeting the demands of a housing crisis. Hermann Henselmann, the architect who oversaw the project, would later become involved with a number of major designs for the rebuilding of central Berlin.
The decision to utilize Soviet Neoclassicism carried with it a series of charges against the international design community. As Paul Betts has noted, then GDR leader Walter Ulbricht openly opposed an international style of Modernism, providing that “The arrangement of socialist living quarters should harmonize the inhabitant’s material and cultural daily needs.” (Betts 103) For Ulbricht there was a continued reliance on a grand National past, a tradition that the GDR was the rightful heir of and must continue. Largely this resulted in a rejection of Modernism associated with the Bauhaus or industrialization of designed objects. Beauty was felt to be a trait of this imagined national inheritance and invariably it was chosen that an architectural language such as Classicism was essential for providing the cohesiveness of a new modern Socialist identity. “Furniture manufactured in the Bauhaus style does not correspond to the sensitivity to beauty among the new Germany’s progressive human beings.” (Betts 103)
The aesthetic of beauty relies on unstable terrains and so it should not be unexpected that a firm rejection of Modernism might only be fleeting. Instead there is a manifestation throughout the planning history of the GDR that serves as an aesthetic trace of beauty. Whether this is a beauty achieved through the replication of bourgeoisie conditions through Neoclassicism, such as Garnier’s Opera House in Paris, or a realization of Sant’Elia’s ever changing Futurist city, within this trace is located a propensity towards instability. Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the planning of central Berlin from the 1950s until the end of the GDR in the 1980s, within which the impression of the Marx-Engels-Forum first found a stable base.
Making Plans
In the 1950s the newly formed GDR entertained a series of plans for how the development of housing may occur in tandem with the production of a new urban center. One outcome, the Karl-Marx-Allee, represented a merger between the needs of the republic and the GDR’s quest to forge a new central Berlin4. While the larger problem of meeting housing demand persisted for a number of decades, to implement any significant projects a city plan would need to be established. The process was tumultuous as confrontations between East and West Germany manifested themselves in the form of various design competitions5. A significant amount of energy and political determination were expended on these competitions as each part of the split Germany informally and formally approached the topic of reunification through planning. As Ladd notes, “neither side every fully acknowledged the division of the city; the official view in East and West was that Berlin was one city and the other side was responsible for its unfortunate partition.” (Ladd 180)
The proliferation of city plans reflects the shifting desires of the GDR to represent itself in the built form. A major alteration occurred in the GDR’s program when Nikolai Kruschev replaced Stalin as leader of the USSR. The former Soviet Neoclassicism which both the GDR and the USSR had initially chosen as their de facto architectural language was negated by Kruschev6, who ushered in an industrialized, modernist language. The former Soviet Neoclassicism was critiqued for its inefficiency to meet the demands of the nation, both in the USSR and the GDR with Kruschev calling for streamlined production of housing.
While the design competitions for the city of Berlin had produced a series of plans, the inability to implement aspects of these had been rooted in the lack of resources needed to produce monumental architecture. As Kruschev ushered in the modernist aesthetic by championing industrialized construction, the GDR established a series of principles that would define further development by defining a socialist city. Bruno Flierl specifies these characteristics:
-to be the city where the controlling bodies for national politics, state and the economy are located;
-to be a city of science, research and teaching;
-to be a city of electrical engineering and electronics;
-to be a city of intellectual and cultural life
-to be a city of international traffic (Flierl 98)
To produce an urban context that would encapsulate these tendencies it was necessary at some point to condense a number of their functions. This is most apparent when the history of the Palace of the Republic is explicated. The Palace of the Republic was the outcome of a serious deferral stemming from the founding of the GDR. It is also intertwined with the production of the Marx-Engels-Forum, as they were originally to be the same urban project.
In the 1950s when the GDR had first been created there was a decision to tear down the badly damaged royal palace situated in Berlin’s urban core. The new socialist government saw the royal palace as a symbol of Prussian militarism, and like the previous regime of the Third Reich which had censored or destroyed many cultural artifacts, the newly founded government destroyed the royal palace to delineate a clear break from Prussian militarism. (Diedendorf 195) For the emerging republic this left a concrete void in the center of their new urban condition. Schinkel’s Lustgarten had previously shared the landscape with the royal palace but had since been paved over by the Nazis to provide grounds for public displays of military regimentation. With the royal palace destroyed the concrete void was increased, creating an urge to design a monument to Marx and Engels, the fathers of scientific socialism, that would serve as the symbolic center of German socialism while also providing a new palace to serve the functions of the state.
A major component of this production was creating a space where mass gatherings could occur. Not unlike the Nazis the German socialists relied on mass gatherings to reiterate national ideology and create a nationalist sense of unity (Ladd 56). When first envisioned the monument was to be a grand tower, a high-rise, in which the state would be housed while guarded by a monumental sculpture of Marx and Engels. The palace would then become an appendage of state administration intimately tied into the urban core. There would also be an expanse of space conserved for mass gatherings which were a common aspect of socialist lifestyle in the GDR. Schinkel’s Altes museum would remain but much of the previous context of the Museum Island had either been destroyed by war, the Nazis or the GDR. Ideally the situation created an opportunity to remove hindrances of the past in order to produce a socialist future; a pattern not unique to the GDR and continuing today.
The realization of this monument was the pursuit of many architects in competitions ranging throughout the 1950s and 1960s(SEE IMAGE). While there was always a changing emphasis on the development of a new modern socialist nationalism and the priority of housing, it remained unclear what may become of the former palace square. A first draft was submitted in 1951 by the Berlin Planning Party, under the lead of Edmund Collein. The plan was loyal to the central tower concept and also envisaged a series of high-rise blocks surrounding the monument. Following this submission, another proposal from 1953 envisioned the central tower in a narrow, gothic steeple style while also proposing significant changes to the urban tectonics by joining Marx-Engels-Platz, Alexanderplatz and Stalinallee by Karl Liebknecht Strasse rather than by Rathausstrasse. (Flierl 115-6) With the restructuring of the urban streets there was now a more clear architectural context for future development, creating a unified visual and cultural language rather than a disparate sampling. Formerly great attention had been given to the scale of surrounding buildings when Schinkel designed the Lustgarten and Altes Museum on SpreeInsel, or Museum Island. For a contemporary observer this dedication to a homogeneity of scale emphasizes the GDR’s commitment to a national past and enactment of German tradition through a unified plan, or possibly a gesamkunstwerkt.
Sensitivity to tradition was continued as a third plan, by a team under Gerhard Kosel in 1957 (see image), then followed taking cue from the traffic structure of the second plan. The proposal to retain the modified traffic structure was retained, creating a cohesive urban context, but Kosel’s team surrounded the central tower structure by pond like recesses from the River Spree. The first three drafts submitted continued to build upon one another, improving the urban condition first through establishing a central landmark, or node, then following by creating a cohesive urban core of paths. Of the three plans none were implemented though their visions were continued and modified.
The GDR held a design competition in 1958-9 entitled, “International Design Competition for the Socialist Reconstruction of the City Centre of the Capital of the German Democratic Republic.” (Flierl 115-6) Many of the proposals submitted were within the framework established by the GDR authorities. They contained a central tower which would house the bureaucracy of the state while also exhibiting a monumental sculpture of Marx and Engels. Two designs specifically deviated from this plan, that of the Hermann Henselmann Collective and the design by the Naumov Team.
According to Flierl the Henselmann Collective envisioned, “replacing the planned high-rise office block by a television tower as Berlin’s dominating landmark and housing the offices of the People’s Chamber and the Council of Ministers in a relatively low building.” (Flierl 116) The deviation was unique in that it both ignored the request of a high-rise office block while seriously excluding any consideration for a monument to Marx and Engels. Rather the Henselmann Collective included a 320 meter radio tower signaling the transmission of socialism throughout the world. Similarly, the Naumov Team suggested a central building housing a large auditorium rather than a high-rise apartment block and then a 260 meter metal needle that would serve as Berlin’s landmark. Other variations existed within the designs but the greatest deviations were the lack of a central high-rise tower or a monument to Marx and Engels, for these reasons both proposals were rejected by the judges and Kosel’s plan from 1957 still exemplified most closely the desires of the GDR authorities.
In 1961, following the competition, the City Council decided on a reconstruction plan for the city center. The basic framework consisted of a central thoroughfare composed by Unter den Linden and the Berlin Forum around Marx-Engels-Platz up to Alexanderplatz with the Karl-Marx-Allee as a longitudinal axis while Frieidrichstrasse and the Spree Island served as transverse axes. (Flierl 116) Though the design competition had presented the judges with an array of possibilities for the monument to Marx and Engels, or the new palace, it remained unsure of a design and only decided that the palace would be built on the East bank of the River Spree. Eventually it was decided that the plan of the Herman Henselmann collective would be partially pursued for development8, though it violated the original design competition rules. (See attached images) This would not be until nearly a decade after the original competition when according to Ladd, “technological modernity had become the East’s accepted architectural language and a television tower based on Helsemann’s design was in fact built”. (Ladd 190)
Spectres of deferral
Similar to the realization of the Henselmann Collective’s plan for the center of Berlin, the monument to Marx and Engels was deferred while also being deformed. It was not until the 1970s that a plan for the new socialist palace was finally developed under a team led by Heinz Graffunder. Radically unlike the proposals submitted to the original competition, Graffunder’s team designed a building clearly derived from international modernism. The Palace of the Republic was composed of an elongated volume clad in bronze-stained glass and marble. There was a very clear deviation from the original intention of the GDR, when under the influence of Stalin, to design a high-rise tower decorated with a monumental sculpture of Marx and Engels. The reality of the project was a low volume consisting of mixed uses. The Palace of the Republic had been a complex for bureaucratic functions while also serving a series of social needs by providing space for birthday parties, weddings, cafes, bowling alleys and bars.
Just as the 1950s vision for a grand tower to socialism was reinterpreted so was the original monument to Marx and Engels. Finally realized in 1986 the Marx-Engels-Forum was placed behind the Palace of the Republic, East of the Spree River. Now two moderately larger than life-size bronze figures of Marx and Engels occupy a park with ribbon-like sidewalks and gentle plantings. The design of the park itself is fairly unremarkable and its discontinuity with the current urban meshwork has led to recent speculation about its future. It is unclear whether the sculptor Ludwig Engelhardt designed both the central sculpture of Marx and Engels, and the park itself, or whether the design was left to an unrecorded Socialist Unity Party (SED) collective. The Marx and Engels monument is surrounded by a series of sculptures by various artists, all centered around the theme of life under Socialism and the workers’ movement.
The forum occupies a complex space in time and culture. The correlation between a transitional phase in architectural languages between Neoclassicism and Modernism reduced emphasis on monumentality as can be seen both in the former Palace of the Republic and the artistic style of the Marx and Engels monument, including the design of the forum in its entirety. There exists a degree of restraint in the sculpture(s) within the forum, they lack the grandiosity of the Ernst Thällmann monument and others emblematic of Socialist Realism10. Unlike other monumental works of Socialist Realism, the artwork in the Marx-Engels-Forum persists as tangible cultural artifacts, almost uninspiring . Post-unification actions have largely left this forum untouched, unlike many other sites in Berlin which have been subject to erasure and repair in accordance with the current political system.
The forum therefore represents a serious deferral, an almost conservative approach to design. Against the radicalism of the variable housing projects that were meant to inspire and propagate a new modern socialist Germany, the forum can be contrasted by its lengthy propagation. Desired in the 1950s, it took nearly four decades to be realized by an artist collective led by Engelhardt. Shortly after the forum’s production the GDR toppled, and with it many of its urban projects and public art. But the forum continues to persist, as it did for nearly four decades in the imaginations of the GDR officials and citizens.
There may be a close link between the lacking volatility of the public artwork and the curious absence of any ideologically loaded structures on the site that has allowed the Marx-Engels-Forum to remain. As many Socialist Realist monuments have been destroyed since post-unification it is somewhat surprising that Marx and Engels have not followed a similar path. A twice than life-size figure of Marx sits while Engels stands, both men look absently towards the West and the now vacant lot where the former Palace of the Republic once stood. But there are no grand gestures given by either of the revolutionaries, they are not holding an axe and divider nor are their bodies being supported by crushed swastikas underneath their feet; they are only waiting and staring absently.
Witness to change
Until recently the Palace of the Republic stood to the West of the forum. In 2002 and 2003 the German Bundestag decided that the palace should be demolished with great outcry from both Germans and the international community.(Flierl 10)(Von Buttlar) With the palace’s recent demolition to provide space for the Humboldt Forum11, the stability of the Marx-Engels-Forum has been reviewed by the Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung. According to a report issued by the Senate in April of 2002 the Marx-Engels-forum will stay intact, however changes to the design are envisioned to integrate it with the newly forming vision for the urban core. (Bundestag)
According to Beatrix Burtin of the Städtebau und Projekte in Berlin, dialogues have been initiated to address the signification of the forum in a campaign called “Rathausforum” just this year. (Burtin) By 2011 the current concept has the monuments of Marx, Engels and others moving underground. Then within two years a design competition will be initiated for the forum, attempting to integrate the space with the rest of the urban core through a mitigation of history ranging from the founding of Berlin in the 13th century until the present.
Whether the Marx-Engels-Forum will dismiss the immediate demand of integration by the current government, is yet unclear. However, the Humboldt Forum will consist of a partially reconstructed royal palace by the Italian architect Franco Stella integrated with a type of modernism that could be said to reflect the former Palace of the Republic. This urban revitalization program will radically alter the urban context surrounding the Marx-Engels-Forum, once again. According to Thomas Flierl, “The Humboldt Forum was and is a great deal more than just a fortunate inspiration to legimitise the reconstruction of the Schloss.” (Flierl 10)
The Marx-Engels-Forum then persists as a relic of an increasingly erased era. Demonstrating neither grandiose architecture nor monuments, the forum produces a stately quality through its ambiguity. It neither urges nor satiates as it consists only of simple greenery and a few obdurate sculptures. Surrounded by changing street names, vanishing buildings and spectres of the urban meshwork, it is a process of recovery for the core of Berlin. It first enacted this position in the 1950s when it became a stitching point of meaning for the newly formed GDR. The proposal of a monument to Marx and Engels was meant to consolidate the emerging identity of East Germans while also contributing to a spatial definition of modern German socialism. While its realization took decades, its production altered the urban core of Berlin by adding new layers of meaning. With the demise of the GDR the Marx-Engels-Forum is now once again pushed into the abstract of planning, contributing to a new definition of German identity once again while redefining the spatial experience of Berlin and possibly a continuous deferral12.
Please find the bibliography under “resources”
Endnotes
1The erasure of past political systems is a common occurrence in Berlin. For many visitors it is not entirely unlikely that street names have been revised numerous times, nor that familiar landmarks may have seemingly disappeared. (Till)
2According to Paul Betts the most reliable figures estimate that through the 1950s 52 percent of houses had only one to two rooms. Central heating was present in less than three percent of homes and only 30 percent of residences had a toilet, with only 22 percent containing a bath.
3The Stalinist understanding of international modernism was deeply reactionary and situated in a rejection of perceived “formalism” and “cosmopolitanism.”
An uncanny similarity exists between both the GDR and the Third Reich in their negation of modernism as each relied upon a reactionary rhetoric as a tool of nation building.
4Largely the significance of this project is a spatial definition of German Socialism. The Karl-Marx-Allee can be read as a mid-century realization of what the future was to be like.
5The politics of these design competitions are reflected in West German claims to Berlin in its entirety. The competition “Berlin, the capital” of 1957-8 is a prime example. (Flierl 93)
6Gradually modernism became an accepted language after Kruschev denounced “ostentatious monumentality” in December 1954, as he succeeded Stalin. (Ladd, 222)
8It is also important to note that the design by the Henselmann collective was not constructed on Spreeinsel, rather it was pushed North into what is now recognized as Alexanderplatz. While the radio tower has become representative of Berlin’s urban core, the outcome was highly divorced from the original desires of the 1950s and should not be mistaken as the originally envisioned socialist palace.
10It is common to associate grandiose sculpture with Socialist Realism as it was generally a hallmark characteristic. The Soviet sculptor Nikolai Tomsky produced a 63 foot tall statue of Lenin in the Berlin neighborhood of Leninplatz until it was destroyed in 1991. Alongside this public artwork the Ernst Thällman monument may also be considered indicative of this style, reaching 43 feet into the air. (Ladd 202)
The colossal qualities of these sculptures earn them their status as monuments and function to reiterate citizen interpellation through becoming landmarks in an urban context. This may be the reason the fate of such sculptures brings an early demise.
11The Humbolt Forum is to be a cultural center in the core of Berlin. After the demise of the GDR and the destruction of the Palace of the Republic, continuous suggestions were made to rebuild the former royal palace. The Humboldt Forum is to be a response to these and will incorporate the Dahlem museums, parts of the State Museum in Berlin and the Humboldt University.
In an introduction to the project, Thomas Flierl writes that, “with this grand projet Germany is reconnecting with its tradition as a nation of culture and science” (Flierl 10) There is a seeming similarity between this precedent and the past socialist planning precedents.
12In 1950 Aufbaugesetz was a reconstruction act making all land public and available for development. (Flierl 39) The land that is now the Marx-Engels-Forum had previously been privately owned, but with Aufbaugesetz and the confiscation of property from Jews by the Nazis, it was filtered into the control of the state
As reparations are being made to the victims/families of the Holocaust, the stability of plans by the German government for this area may be deemed contestable
