It’s easy to feel like Gulliver in the Land of Brobdingnag on monumental Karl-Marx-Allee, one of Berlin's most impressive GDR-era relics. Built in the 1950s, the 90m-wide boulevard runs for 2.3km between Alexanderplatz and Frankfurter Tor and is a fabulous showcase of East German architecture. It was a considerable source of national pride back then, providing modern flats for comrades and serving as a backdrop for military parades.
Some of the finest East German architects of the day (Hartmann, Henselmann, Hopp, Leucht, Paulick and Souradny) collaborated on KMA's construction, looking to Moscow for inspiration. There, Stalin favored a style that was essentially a socialist reinterpretation of good old-fashioned neoclassicism. In East Berlin, Prussian building master Karl Friedrich Schinkel was the stylistic godfather, rather than Walter Gropius and the functional modernist aesthetic embraced in West Berlin.
Living here was considered a privilege; in fact, for a long time there was no better standard of living in East Germany. Flats featured such luxuries as central heating, lifts, tiled baths and built-in kitchens; facades were swathed in Meissen tiles.
