Since virtually all of the museums in Berlin are closed on Monday, I decided to head into the heart of the old East Berlin to visit the landmarks of the former capital city of the DDR. From my hotel, it was a short walk to the Unter den Linden U-Bahn station from where I could jump on the U5 to the Magdalenenstraße station to begin my 3.5 km walk to the Alexanderplatz.

When I ascended to the street, Frankfurter Allee, I confronted a far less rarified neighborhood than the one in which my hotel is situated. A short walk took me to the ominous buildings of the dreaded Stasi, short for the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry of State Security), which at its peak employed 1% of the DDR’s population. As I’ve often seen in the East, many of the buildings are already decaying. The Stasi complex is expansive, though. I was pleased that the 4-story Stasi Museum was open, so I took the tour. The long-time Stasi chief, Erich Mielke, kept his large office there, and even had a bedroom and shower. As was typical with the first generation of Stalinists, he had barely a high school education and the physiognomy of a peasant. This was the ideal totalitarian type whose innately brutal nature was one that the State could count on to cow the population.

Milch survived until his boss, Erich Honecker, fled the DDR within weeks of the huge parade celebrating the 40th birthday of the DDR. The new Politbüro ousted him and disbanded the Stasi within weeks of the first democratic election in the East in early 1990.

After leaving the museum, I continued down the Frankfurter Allee towards the Frankfurter Tor, two identical “gates” built in the Stalinist neo-classical style. Shortly past the twin towers is the old Kosmos Cinema, which was the premiere film palace of the DDR and which closed in 1989. It reminded me of a similar theater in Pripyat, the city where the Chernobyl catastrophe occurred in April 1986 and which I saw during my visit there in 2018.

The next stop was the Karl-Marx-Allee, also lined with Stalinist and “catch-up” Modernist apartment blocks. Before reunification, there was no tree-lined median strip since it was used for massive May Day and military parades during the Communist-era. Further on, one arrives at another “gate” pair of Stalinist buildings at the Strausberger Platz.

Karl-Marx-Allee and Frankfurter Allee are lined with these housing blocks, some of which were prefabricated. I wonder if there’s a certain retro chic attached to these structures. This part of Berlin resembles Moscow and Minsk more than it resembles the western part of Berlin, and is a bit shabby, though perfectly safe.

As I got closer to the Alexanderplatz, I spotted two more interesting buildings: Kino International, another old cinema, and Café Moskau. After some research, I discovered that during the DDR era, there were cafes named after all of the Eastern Bloc capitals, but that only Café Moskau remains.

For a then and now look, this photo is from the 40th anniversary parade of the DDR in October 1989, where Gorbachev was the honored guest. It’s amazing that the dictatorship dissolved a few weeks later. There’s also a short clip of the parade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_9jqxCVpLI&t=28s

This part of Berlin is largely unknown to tourists. It’s still a bit shabby and run-down but well worth exploring.