Even if, like many Berliners, you’ve never ventured into the outer district of Marzahn, you may have heard tales of monotonous concrete Plattenbau and right-wing residents. In the 1990s, the former East German district was a no-go area for non-white people and leftists. Marzahn did itself no favours by electing Berlin’s only representative from the AfD in February of this year.
Many Berliners – including, until recently, this historian – only have the faintest idea where Marzahn is or what it looks like. I set off into the rows of identical apartment buildings to test an outlandish thesis: Marzahn, experts assure us, is actually rather beautiful.
The village of Morczane
The earliest mention of ‘Morczane’ dates back to 1300, not long after the first written record of Berlin from 1237. As Berlin grew into a global city, the village of Marzahn didn’t change much. In the 19th century, the countryside around Marzahn was used as a Rieselfeld, a sewage field for Berlin’s wastewater.
Only in 1898 was a train link established to the city. In 1920, the hamlet was subsumed into Greater Berlin, becoming a part of Lichtenberg. You can still see remnants of old Marzahn today: the church, the former school (now a museum) and the farm houses that surround the village green. A tram line goes right past a reconstruction of the windmill.
Today, however, Alt-Marzahn is surrounded by enormous apartment buildings. This goes back to March 1973, when the politburo of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) decided that the area would be used to build new apartments. Half a year later, this was folded into the massive Wohnungsbauprogramm (apartment construction programme), with which the central committee promised to “solve the housing question” by 1990.
Very quickly, the sleepy village became the largest construction site in Europe. (Eat your heart out, Potsdamer Platz!) The very first concrete slab was installed on July 8, 1977. Today, a plaque and a phallic concrete sculpture, Richtkrone, mark the birthplace of the concrete estate.
The next year, the DDR celebrated the completion of the “millionth apartment”. East German head honcho Erich Honecker personally handed over the keys to Luise-Zietz-Straße 129 to a working-class family, who dutifully praised the workers’ and farmers’ state.
On January 5, 1979, Berlin got its first new district since the Greater Berlin Act in 1920: Marzahn got a charter. Western politicians were enraged – the East couldn’t simply add districts to a city that was still under the joint administration of the four occupying powers. Yet the Western military commanders shrugged and the cranes kept lugging concrete. On May 1, 1980, 45 years ago, the district got its coat of arms: a big M with grains above, symbolising agriculture traditions, and a cog wheel below, representing the district’s industrialisation.
The rise of Plattenbau
Over time, East Germany’s architects, engineers and construction workers became increasingly efficient. Building designs were standardised, and sections of apartments – including entire bathrooms – were premade in factories, meaning they could quickly be assembled on site. It was not uncommon to go from breaking ground to handing over keys to new tenants within four months. Spurned on by “socialist competition”, workers sometimes completed an entire building in an astounding 50 days.
Even after 40 years the Plattenbau stand up well environmentally, with heat coming from central power stations via gigantic pipes.
Working with precast pieces, like human-sized LEGO sets, urban planners built striking spaces like Springpfuhl, where massive apartment blocks tower over a lake and a square named after the German actress Helene Weigel. Marzahn’s brown-tiled city hall looks like a tropical house, with plants tumbling down a slanted, sun-filled atrium. This square is the entrance to Marzahn, opening up onto a long promenade which leads toward a cultural centre with a theatre and a swimming pool: the Freizeitforum.
As the district kept expanding, however, the DDR was running out of money and energy. Nord-Marzahn, on the border to Brandenburg, is dominated by an inescapable architectural ennui, with smaller buildings that feel placed haphazardly to meet a quota, rather than lovingly arranged in an aesthetically pleasing ensemble
Yet for East Berliners fleeing the inner city – sick of lugging coal up to their pre-war apartments, which often lacked toilets, baths and showers – Marzahn was paradise. There were waiting lists to get a coveted Neubau apartment. This trend that would reverse just a few years later, with many eager to move back into Altbau as soon as there was money to renovate.
A district in decline
By 1990, the Marzahn project was almost completed and the district reached its demographic zenith of 148,000 residents. Yet the changes brought by East Germany’s collapse were particularly dramatic. In the first elections, over a third of Marzahners voted for the SED’s successor party, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) – the DDR had provided for these people, after all.
As the minimalist-socialist aesthetic fell into disrepute, people with means headed back toward the inner city. Many of those left behind, after losing not just jobs but also identities, turned to far-right ideologies. Marzahn became a centre of Berlin’s neo-Nazi movement. Nguyen Văn Tú, an immigrant from Vietnam, was stabbed to death in 1992 by a right-wing extremist.
Gradually, the apartments were sold off, with about a third ending up in the hands of public housing companies, another third with cooperatives and 15% with corporate landlords. The cranes were cranked up once again, this time to disassemble several thousand apartments. Over 100 buildings classed as social infrastructure, such as schools, day care centres and shops, were torn down. The DDR’s model district was left to decay.
This is partly why modern-day Marzahn is considered so ugly: The most attractive things were torn down. The Kino Sojus movie theatre next to the city hall was shuttered in 2007 and now stands as a boarded-up, graffiti-covered hulk. These days, Marzahn offers little in the way of cultural attractions – except for the 100-hectare Gärten der Welt park, which opened in 1987.
Many of the original inhabitants from the early 1980s are still there, well past retirement age. It’s no coincidence that in Katja Oskamp’s 2019 story collection, Marzahn, Mon Amour – translated to English and half a dozen other languages – most of the characters are pensioners.
The population bottomed out in 2011, at just 100,000 people. But Marzahn has been slowly recovering, partially due to the large influx of immigrants coming to Berlin since 2015. Among those who’ve been living in the city for a while, it’s not exactly that Marzahn has become popular, but exploding rents in other parts of the city have weakened people’s aversion.
After the fall of the Wall, a lot of the remaining free space was filled with single-family homes in an eerie copy of US suburbs. So now Marzahn has some of the most efficient form of housing ever constructed: Even after 40 years the Plattenbau stand up well environmentally, with heat coming from central power stations via gigantic pipes. And right next door is the least efficient form: detached houses, each with their own heating systems and exterior walls, are the most carbon-intensive way to live.
Today, Marzahn is getting some new quarters. The Georg-Knorr-Park, in a former industrial zone right next to S-Bhf Marzahn, will include 1,600 flats. In the spirit of our times, the design – by David Chipperfield’s firm – will be bespoke and the construction ecological. Yet it will also take until at least the early 2030s until everyone can move in.
The geographer Felix Böhmer grew up in Prenzlauer Berg but has studied Marzahn for several years. You can see all the contradictions of East German Communism here, he tells me, both its “utopianism” and its “rigidity”. The state aimed to provide every person with quality housing – yet “everything was designed around the nuclear family, with very little opportunity for the people living there to make it their own”, he says. Indeed, nearly all the apartments have two or three rooms, with almost no larger apartments for young people and non-nuclear families to experiment with living in a Wohngemeinschaft scenario.
The blocks of Plattenbau can indeed feel monotonous, like a retirement community built for surviving but not living. But perhaps our individuality is not expressed in the façades of our apartment buildings. Rather, it’s only when our need for a home is met that we can truly be individuals. From that perspective, the standardised concrete housing is arguably peak humanism.
But is it beautiful? Böhmer recalls a professor telling him: “If you look at Marzahn for long enough, you will start to find it beautiful.” I’ve been walking around for a few weeks, and I’m still not sure.
