After May 8, 1945, from air bombardments and fighting on the streets of the city, Berlin turned into a ruin. Tourists even went there to see the incredible level of destruction.
There are mountains of garbage and rubble in Berlin. The city was cleaned and restored by women, because all the men left in the city were either children or old men. The rubble was disassembled with bare hands – they became a chain and passed the stones from hand to hand.
The city historian Manfred Ulitz told TSN about this.
The researcher says that Berlin, as it was in 1943, is very different from what it became 10 years later. At that time, they didn’t think much about the concept of restoring the city, it was necessary to stamp out residential buildings at a pace. People had nowhere to live. Only later did restoration become an ideology, after the Soviet Union walled off the part of the city controlled by the GDR overnight.
“When the wall appeared in 1961, West Berlin began to worry about how long they could stay in the city, where to keep their savings. There was a fear that the Soviet Union would try to take away West Berlin and control the entire city. And in this turbulent time, an investor appears and builds here incredible shopping mall with cinemas, cabarets, maybe by today's standards it looks modest, but then it was grandiose!” said Manfred Ulitz.
Meanwhile, East Berlin continued to destroy the remnants of what was left after the war.
“There was a law in the GDR that buildings that were damaged by less than 40 percent must be rebuilt. But they did not like churches and palaces there. Therefore, the Berlin Palace was demolished in the air and received a large area for socialist parades and demonstrations,” the historian explains.
In West Berlin, too, there were attempts to get rid of dilapidated sights, but they still reckoned with the will of the citizens. A dilapidated tower Kaiser Wilhelm Church was preserved and made a memorial precisely because of the pressure of citizens.
“The Kaiser Wilhelm Church has become a reminder of West Berlin and a kind of anti-war monument. The authorities intended to demolish it and build a new building, but they received 47,000 angry letters from citizens and so the church was preserved,” says Ulitz.
But the indignant citizens of the socialist GDR were stopped by Soviet tanks. The uprising was decided by the workers, who were actually forced to work for free. In June 1953, the protest turned into large-scale riots.
“There were uprisings not only in East Berlin, but also in many cities of the Soviet occupation. The Berlin authorities asked the Russians to sort it out, they drove in tanks and fired into the crowd. Only in Berlin, 14 people died,” says the historian.
The center of East Berlin – Alexanderplatz and the TV tower – were also rebuilt with an eye on Moscow.
“When the TV tower was opened in 1969, it was the second highest in the world. The highest was in Moscow. Of course, it was impossible to build higher than in Moscow,” said Ulitz.
The Berlin City Hall was an exception – you can still see how this building was carefully restored, literally pebble by pebble.
And there are many such buildings that have risen from the collected bricks and blocks in the German capital. From the collapsed houses, a socialist boulevard of luxury was almost completely assembled – Stalin Alley, later renamed Karl Marx Alley. And even after the fall of the wall, the bricks from the Berlin post-war ruins went to be restored – just for memory.
“The architect bought this old brick and restored the destroyed fragments of the museum with it. In order to still be visible the extent of the destruction of the building. Now this is the history of the war. Here are all these traces left after the street fighting for Berlin. They could easily be covered up, but they were left as a keepsake,” explains the historian.
According to Manfred Ulitz, the example of Potsdamer Platz can work in Ukraine as well. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was rebuilt not at the expense of the city, but by private companies and entrepreneurs.
77 years after the war and 33 years after the fall of the wall, Berlin continues to rebuild, a brand new city is emerging with numerous references to the great war and the division between the two ideologies.
