Central government tower of the GDR

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The central government high- rise of the GDR was a design as part of the ideas competition for the socialist redesign of the capital of the GDR , Berlin, from 1957, which intended to build a skyscraper in the style of socialist classicism on the area of ​​the destroyed Berlin City Palace and the destroyed Marienviertel .

prehistory

The center of Berlin was largely destroyed or badly damaged by the Second World War . This resulted in the possibility of redesigning the entire urban area throughout Berlin . In the western part of the city , the architecture competition for the capital city of Berlin was announced . The East responded with the aforementioned ideas competition for the socialist transformation of the GDR's capital, Berlin .

The area from the central part of the Spree Island , the location of the ruins of the Berlin City Palace, through the Marienviertel , which was badly damaged by bombing, to Alexanderplatz was intended for the central government high-rise of the GDR . The entire area was intended as the political center of East Berlin as the capital of the GDR.

"The center of the city gets its characteristic image through monumental buildings and an architectural composition that does justice to the importance of the capital of Germany."

- Walter Ulbricht

In the summer of 1950, the SED decreed that the "center of the city should be the pleasure garden and the area of ​​the current castle ruins". With this, the SED, together with the construction law of 1950, made it possible to demolish the city palace and redesign the center of Berlin.

To redesign the city center, an ideas competition was announced in which 56 architects from seven countries took part.

Draft of the skyscraper

The architect Hermann Henselmann reached into his design for the government high-rise to the style of Stalinist architecture, which is already in Moscow with the Seven Sisters , or in Warsaw with the Palace of Culture in similar buildings - and already in Berlin at the Karl-Marx-Allee - for Application came.

The skyscraper was supposed to reach a planned height of 150 meters and would have exceeded today's Park Inn on Alexanderplatz. Before the government high-rise building as a meeting place should be developed, which on the highway Karl-Liebknecht-Straße would have to reach for mass marches. For the construction of the government headquarters, the Spree and the Spree Canal, which flow around the Spree island, had to be largely covered in the middle of the island. A 25-meter-high monument to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was to be erected in front of the building .

Other drafts even provided for the construction of a large water basin south of the central government high-rise, including a steamboat landing stage, which would have meant completely demolishing the fallow Nikolaiviertel, one of the two oldest residential areas in Berlin.

End of planning and replacement buildings

At the beginning of the 1960s, the planning for a government high-rise and the redesign of the center of Berlin were stopped due to financial difficulties and only resumed when the GDR was internationally recognized in 1973 and thus needed a representative government district.

The State Council building was erected as representative replacement buildings on the Spree island and the building of the GDR Foreign Ministry in the immediate vicinity on the Schinkelplatz area . The Palast der Republik was built directly on the Spree island and across the Spree, in the area of ​​the former Marienviertel, the Marx-Engels-Forum .

At the end of the former Marienviertel, on the edge of Alexanderplatz, the Berlin TV tower was also built in this context . As part of the ideas competition, Henselmann had already submitted an out-of-order design that included the construction of a tower of signals , i.e. a television tower, instead of a government high-rise.

swell

  • Architects and Engineers Association of Berlin V. (Ed.): Berlin and its buildings. Part 1: Urban planning. DOM Publishers, Berlin, 2009.
  • Hans Stimmann (ed.): Berlin old town. From the GDR state center to the city center. DOM Publishers, Berlin, 2009.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jörn Düwel in: Hans Stimmann (Ed.): Berliner Altstadt. From the GDR state center to the city center. DOM Publishers, Berlin, 2009.
  2. ↑ Historical center: How Berlin's old town was planned away. In: Berliner Morgenpost , May 11, 2009.
  3. ↑ The new center of our capital. In: Neues Deutschland , November 1, 1959, p. 8

Coordinates: 52 ° 31 ′ 6.4 ″  N , 13 ° 24 ′ 16.1 ″  E