Architecture in Berlin: What remained of the future

The first impression? It flashes. It lights up. And it has humor. In front of the exhibition space, an installation by the American multimedia artist Tracey Snelling welcomes the audience with lots of color and a good mood. She built a desk-sized model of a terraced residential hill whose geometric shape is reminiscent of a rectangular truncated pyramid.

A small film flickers behind each of the numerous windows, and in front of the house there are mainly little cardboard men with tanned six-packs lounging around the pool like Kens without Barbie - and the association machine starts immediately. Ah, this isn't just about architecture! It's about ideas!

It is a small and very insightful exhibition that is currently opening in the Berlinische Galerie about the previously relatively unknown GDR architect Josef Kaiser behind Snelling's intervention. It came about because the son of the GDR architect donated his father's estate to the museum.

On view are drawings, collages and photographs, models and films, some of which have never been shown before. There is not only a lot to learn about the creation of Kaiser's most iconic examples of post-war modernism, which, at least in Berlin, almost everyone now knows and which he was collectively responsible for with others: the Moscow Restaurant, the International Cinema and the Mocha Milk Ice Cream Bar. The latter two were recently extensively renovated and were also duly celebrated in this newspaper.

The show is also about the hopes and dreams that were expressed in the architecture of the GDR. And it's about the question of why, in the eyes of those West German city planners who took over the discourse after the fall of the Wall, this architecture of all things wasn't treated with kid gloves - while now, almost four decades later, people are trying to save what can still be saved. Or, as the press release puts it a little less polemically, why “new perspectives on German-German building history” are only now being opened up.

But from the beginning. Josef Kaiser's biography is not that far removed from that of his much more famous colleague Hermann Henselmann. Similar to him, Kaiser also initially adapted to the state-imposed “national building tradition”. With the Maxhütte cultural center in Thuringia, for example, he created a classicist building that is strongly reminiscent of the monumental confectioner's workers' palaces on what was then Berlin's Stalinallee, today's Karl-Marx-Allee.

In 1956, however, Nikita Khrushchev reckoned with Stalin's crimes and his bad taste. In the future, it should be built more cheaply and in series. What a turnaround! And what an opportunity for the architects of the GDR to finally be able to return to modernism from the beginning of the 1960s, with which they had often been socialized anyway thanks to the Bauhaus.

Many architects must have breathed a sigh of relief when they were able to become more interested in opening up and professional exchange with colleagues on the other side of the wall and not just in isolation and looking towards the East. Now industrial construction methods returned, clear cubes, glass facades and high-rise buildings. Among other things, Hermann Henselmann built the teacher's house with a congress hall on Alexanderplatz.

And Josef Kaiser? Kaiser became known not only for individual buildings, but also for the so-called second construction phase of Karl-Marx-Allee, in which he and others were involved. And even if it wasn't exactly appreciated after the fall of the Wall, today, with its inexpensive, standardized solutions and the relaxed, elegant and urban city landscape that it created, it seems to come from a completely different way of thinking than the first, the confectionery section.

At that time, this new architecture received international recognition. And to this day it gives a lot to think about, especially for those who have the current housing crisis and the question of resource-saving construction in mind.

Kaiser continued in this style elsewhere, as the exhibition shows: Between 1961 and 1963, the Hotel Berolina was built according to plans for which he was partly responsible. Around the same time, the Kosmos cinema was built, which with its 1,001 seats was even larger than the International with its original 608. It boasted an egg-shaped floor plan and matching light walls and doors, white armchairs and an artfully suspended ceiling, also in white.

In 1967, Kaiser built, among other things, the GDR Foreign Ministry, for which Schinkel's building academy had to make way. The “Centrum” department store on Alexanderplatz followed in 1970. In all of these buildings, Kaiser demonstrated what constitutes good architecture to this day: form follows function, everything appears airy and light - even a cinema hall where daylight has no place.

After the fall of communism, all of this suddenly no longer mattered much. And, at least that's the impression one gets, for ideological rather than pragmatic reasons. The Hotel Berolina was demolished in 1996. The cosmos with the generous open spaces all around would make a much more glamorous Berlinale Palace today than the theater on the dreary Potsdamer Platz. But the building was first converted into a bland multiplex; After its failure, the beautiful armchairs were thrown into the scrapheap of history, or more precisely: for a while you could buy them on eBay. Today the cinema serves as an event location.

In other places, too, the city's history, which Kaiser helped write, seems to be going backwards after 1990. Schinkel's building academy is now to be built again where Kaiser built his foreign ministry. And where he was involved in the construction of the Palace of the Republic, today stands the Humboldt Forum, in which much of the content still struggles with the questionable form of a supposedly aristocratic cream box.

However, despite the exhibition, much of what Kaiser actually did remains in the dark. This may be partly because, like all architects in the GDR, he worked as a collective and there was less of a personality cult around individual master builders. But it may also have something to do with the fact that Kaiser was a colorful figure who made a career in three political systems.

Just this much: Born in 1910 in what is now Slovenia, Kaiser studied architecture in Prague. During the National Socialist era, he worked, among other things, as an architect in the central architectural office of the German Labor Front. After the war he attempted a remarkable new start, studying opera singing in Dresden and only returning to architecture in 1950. Shortly afterwards he became chief architect for a while of the socialist residential town of Stalinstadt, now Eisenhüttenstadt.

The exhibition runs until February 1, 2027, Wed to Mon 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., closed on Tuesdays. The day ticket for all exhibitions costs 12 euros, reduced price 7 euros. There are dialogic tours, guided tours in the urban space and much more. Berlinische Galerie, Alte Jakobstraße 124 – 128.

A symposium is about "Becoming visible. Josef Kaiser and the architecture of the GDR". It will take place on January 22nd, 2027 from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., registration and everything else at berlinischegalerie.de

The fact that Kaiser did not simply carry out state orders, but rather dreamed big, is shown by the original concept of the aforementioned cultural center in Thuringia. At first he did not think of it in the neoclassical form in which it was later created, but rather in a much more modern way - rather in a formal language that is reminiscent of Hans Poelzig's buildings. They seem as if he wanted to largely break away from representation and respond more to modern mass society.

However, this can be seen even better in the residential hill mentioned at the beginning, with which Tracey Snelling enters into dialogue in the exhibition. Kaiser designed it in the late 1960s as part of a larger concept for a “Socialist Residential City”. Unlike many other residential complexes, Kaiser wanted to combine living, working and community facilities with this design. This is also an interesting thought today in a city of empty office buildings. The project was never realized.