A transition scene of dust clouds and thunder as an old building is demolished. Cut to the housing block that replaced it. A landscape shot of Plattenbau towers rising from ravaged terrain. The camera looks out from an inner-city apartment onto pre-war tenements, then, later, from an unfinished high-rise onto rows of new housing. These moving images come from the state-owned film studio of the German Democratic Republic, DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), a vital archive exploring East Berlin’s past, its urban transformation, and fractured spatial relationships. Film, as a visual memory tool, preserves collective urban memory in a city like Berlin, where redevelopment feeds a cycle of erasure.
As the GDR’s capital and a Cold War frontline, East Berlin was a showpiece for the socialist break from its capitalist-industrial past. Yet that past remained present as many still lived in decaying 19th-century workers’ barracks lacking proper plumbing, heating, and private toilets. Until 1961, two-thirds of the housing stock predated 1918. This led to an ambitious housing plan to replace these dwellings with prefabricated housing. The process was accelerated by Honecker’s 1973 Housing Program, which aimed to provide modern housing for every citizen by 1990.
This break from the past and rush for uniform modern housing was explored by Heiner Carow’s Die Legende von Paul und Paula (1973). Paula, a single mom who values autonomy and authenticity, falls for her opposite: Paul, a successful state worker in a loveless marriage living in a new housing block. Their affair unfolds in Paula’s old flat, a space of imagination and passion, contrasting Paul’s rigid, dutiful world. Real demolition footage is intercut throughout the film, mirroring the city’s transformation. The film uses images of the past and stark contrasts to symbolize a more organic way of life, reflecting growing disillusionment with the modern, imposed cityscape. Paula’s resistance to this overall transformation suggests that accepting life in the new housing blocks means conforming to a prescribed way of life and an identity shaped by the system. Another example could be Hermann Zschosche’s Insel der Schwäne (1982), where a young boy and his family move from his grandmother’s rural cottage to a new Plattenbau settlement in Marzahn. The cultural shift from the old to the new way of life—from natural to artificial surroundings, from fireplaces to radiators, outdoor play to play on the construction site—is highlighted in the film, as his parents accept the new way of life in exchange for modern housing.
Urban planning is not neutral. It is a tool for enforcing power relations to shape collective experience and social behavior. As East Berlin was reshaped to be a model of socialism, today’s Berlin is reshaped to serve global capitalism. We see two periods of a transnational homogenization of urban aesthetics: the socialist block housing and the neutral, sleek design of the neoliberal global city. GDR architecture, driven in part by economic constraints, aimed to produce ideological conformity and a new identity, in the same way today’s minimalist futuristic designs do. These dynamics are seen in Die Architekten (1990, dir. Peter Kahane), in which an unfulfilled architect is finally tasked to design a cultural center, only to have his inspired, idealistic plans blocked by a system insisting on standardized structures. However, standardization and transformation today are not driven by a social need for affordable housing, but by the endless pursuit of profit through reinvestment, leaving the city and its people at the mercy of capital flows and economic shifts. The process of privatization and transformation that followed socialism’s subsumption is ever-present. Working-class displacement has accelerated, leading to demographic shifts and radically new cityscapes. Whether it be the new housing of “Die Macherei” at the foot of a high rise, or the RAW-Gelände, a former train repair station, now a nightlife and culture hub, or the luxury rentals at Gleisdreieck Park and Alexanderplatz, or the proposed housing on Tempelhofer Feld from firm Seilziehn, new developments follow a homogenized aesthetic: minimalistic, boxy buildings with artificial streetscapes, designated leisure areas, and centralized commercial amenities. Ironically, it shares similarities with the socialist housing once criticized by the capitalist West. These sanitized, artificial spaces, in both eras, displace the organically developed urban fabric, erasing cultural and historical specificity. Preserved historical sites are curated, as symbols of repression, the Wall and the Stasi HQ still stand, but much of GDR cultural life, such as the Palast der Republik and the SEZ, have been erased.
Against this backdrop, Berlin’s history of grassroots resistance, from Kotti & Co.’s 2011 rent control victories to the 2017 Volksbühne occupation, and ongoing protests against the Amazon EDGE tower, communities’ slow redevelopment and reclaiming of the narrative. This echoes a longer line of cultural response to change, visible in films including Konrad Wolf’s Solo Sunny (1980). In creating the environment for the film, several years after the start of Honecker’s Housing Plan, the film largely avoids showing the Plattenbau high-rises. Instead, it lingers on the pre-GDR inner-city flats, streets, and shared courtyards, showing the dynamics of those left behind. In the film, we see the lives of those left behind by the Housing Plan, and the reluctance toward a changing city where old spaces dominate the built spatial environment—and where the emotional plot of the story is rooted. By showing how attachment to place can foster defiance to imposed urban transformation, the film itself becomes an act of resistance, stabilizing collective memory and interrupting cycles of erasure.
DEFA archives reveal a layered urban history, capturing the nuances of a city rebuilt for the working class amidst ideological competition and how these nuances can be identified in today’s landscape. We can look to their memory to better understand the social fabrics we navigate daily, and the legacies of history and communities harshly erased to create a blank slate of space and memory, inducing an increasingly hostile urban environment that isn’t accessible to all. It is accountability that leads to resistance.
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- Image credits
Alexandra Bachzetsis, Rush(es), 2025. produced with c/o bardi@care.of.bardi. © and courtesy of the artist. Photography by Estelle Hanania.
