Art and Science on Track

Abstract

In this speech to the parliament of the German Democratic Republic, Walter Ulbricht, First Secretary of the ruling Socialist Unity Party, advocates a “new German architecture” based on stripped classical forms, which, according to Ulbricht, breaks with both “formalist” architecture of the West and fascist architecture. According to Ulbricht, this architecture also recalls the “worthy traditions” of German architecture, and is therefore the appropriate form for rebuilding Berlin–in turn, a symbol of the social reconstruction of East Germany.

Keywords:

• Socialism
• East Germany
• Berlin
• Soviet urbanism
• Bauhaus
• Ulbricht
• rebuilding
• reconstruction
• formalism

Notes

1 Alan Nothnagle, “From Buchenwald to Bismarck: Historical Myth-Building in the German Democratic Republic, 1945-1989,” Central European History 26.1 (1993): 92.

2 See Marcus Colla, “Prussian Palimpsests: Historic Architecture and Urban Spaces in East Germany, 1945-1961,” Central European History 50.2 (June 2017): 196-197.

3 Walter Ulbricht, “Aus der Grußadresse des Zentralkomitees der Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands,” in Verband bildender Künstler der DDR, Weg zur sozialistischen Künstleroganisation: Dokumentationen (Poßneck: Karl-Marx-Werk, 1983), 117-118.

4 Editor’s note: In the German Democratic Republic, which was pathologically fixated on acronyms, MAS stood for Maschinen-Ausleih-Station, which subsequently became Maschinen-Traktoren-Station (MTS). This was a state-run enterprise that loaned agricultural machinery to small-scale farms and was also charged with promoting the political consciousness of rural communities by staging lectures and cultural events in Kulturhäuser.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Walter Ulbricht

Translated from German by Richard George Elliott

Originally published as “Kunst und Wissenschaft im Plan,” Aufbau, 7 (1951): 1071–1076. Republished in and translated from Andreas Schätzke, Zwischen Bauhaus und Stalinallee: Architekturdiskussion im östlichen Deutschland 1945-1954 (2nd edition, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2017), 163–166.