ABSTRACT
East Berlin’s neo-historical developments are relentlessly popular. The highly popular Baedeker tourist guide calls the Platz der Akademie/ Gendarmenmarkt “Berlin’s most beautiful and most harmonic square.”1 It is used as a backdrop for governmental celebrations and cultural events; its restaurants and cafés are continuously filled. The Old-Berlin-style eateries, bars, and giĞ shops in the Nikolaiviertel, on Husemannstraße, and on Sophienstraße are equally aĴractive for both tourists and locals. The Grand Hotel (now Westin Grand Hotel) on Friedrichstraße and the Dom Hotel (now Hilton) on Gendarmenmarkt, which were both erected in the late 1980s, are still among the city’s most prestigious accommodations. The area around Husemannstraße in the Prenzlauer Berg district, the Spandauer Vorstadt neighborhood around Sophienstraße in the MiĴe district, and the neighborhood around Friedrichstraße and Gendarmenmarkt are among the most sought-aĞer locations for residence and commerce. But what is most surprising is that in contemporary Berlin none of these developments is connected with the late socialist regime that mandated their construction. The historical similarities in the urban design on both sides of the now vanished Berlin Wall seems to be incompatible with the self-understanding of nearly all political factions. They neither fit with the ideas of conservative ideologues from the former West, who interpret the German reunification first and foremost as a liberation of the other half, nor with those of loyal socialists from the former East, who saw it as a defeat of their state, and also not with those of the former East German opposition and their sympathizers in the West, who saw it as an unfriendly take-over by the forces of capitalism. Hence the cultural constellations in the last decades of the GDR, which form the background for those projects, are hardly mentioned. PuĴing the neohistorical developments from the late socialist period into a historical context, it seems, first and foremost requires clearing the view on that very recent epoch from the cast of collective forgeĴing.
