East Berlin
— — a city held in concrete and sodium light.
Not only on a wall.
“The eastern half of a divided city, capital of the German Democratic Republic from 1949 until reunification in 1990. Wide socialist boulevards, Plattenbau apartment blocks in soft greys, the television tower above Alexanderplatz holding the sky at 368 metres. Trabants on the Karl-Marx-Allee, sodium streetlamps after dusk, the Spree carrying the same slow brown water it always has. A place that exists now mostly in photographs, in archives, and in the way the older buildings still hold the light. — from the studio
East Berlin, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
East Berlin was the eastern sector of the divided German capital and served as the de facto capital of the German Democratic Republic from the GDR's founding in October 1949 until German reunification on 3 October 1990. The sector covered roughly 403 square kilometres and held about 1.28 million residents at its 1988 peak. After 13 August 1961 it was physically separated from West Berlin by the Berlin Wall, a 155-km barrier system that ran through the centre of the city. Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, and Friedrichshain were among the central boroughs; the Brandenburg Gate stood on the eastern side of the line.
The eastern city's signature architecture was the rebuilt socialist boulevard and the prefabricated concrete Plattenbau. Karl-Marx-Allee, originally Stalinallee, was laid out from 1952 along nearly 2 km of monumental seven- to nine-story workers' housing in a Soviet-classical mode. The Fernsehturm television tower at Alexanderplatz, completed in 1969, rises 368 metres and remains the tallest structure in Germany. The Palast der Republik, the GDR parliament and culture house, opened on the site of the demolished Berliner Stadtschloss in 1976 and was itself torn down between 2006 and 2008. Much of the older fabric in Prenzlauer Berg survived the war and the regime largely unrenovated.
The defining year is 1989. Mass demonstrations through October drew hundreds of thousands into the streets; the Politbüro reshuffled; on the evening of 9 November a press conference by Günter Schabowski, garbled and unscripted, sent East Berliners to the checkpoints. The Bornholmer Strasse crossing opened first, around 11:30 PM. Within weeks the wall was breached the length of the city. Formal reunification followed on 3 October 1990, and East Berlin ceased to exist as an administrative entity. The Brandenburg Gate, closed to civilian crossing since 1961, reopened on 22 December 1989.