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red_star9 сентября 2025 г.In lieu of the “invisible hand” the MfS [Stasi] provided a “clandestine hand.”
420- red_star9 сентября 2025 г.Читать далее
The Klenners recalled doing this, and so did the Bautzes, who found out it was going to take two years for a playground to be built outside their building, due to the fact that the AWG, communal leadership, and Hausmeister could not seem to get their act together. In this case, the building’s residents simply took it upon themselves to stage a mini tennis-court oath, walking out of a communal association committee meeting to the school across the street, where they elected a new leadership committee; one capable of getting at least an interim playground built.
421 - red_star9 сентября 2025 г.Читать далее
In fact, there were so many children in Marzahn that the construction brigades could not keep pace with the influx, and the Kindergartens, KiKos, and schools were not able to accommodate all the children—in this case, a conflict between “child” time and “construction” time. To handle the shortfall, in the fall of 1983, Mayor Cyske and other Berlin city officials arranged for a special tram to carry all the children 19 km to the neighboring districts of Lichtenberg and Hohenschönhausen, which were also being developedwith Plattenbau in the name of the Housing Program. Called the “Bummi train” (Bummibahn), named after the popular East German children’s comic book cartoon bear, Bummi, the Tatra streetcar train would carry hordes of children outside Marzahn until the remaining schools and Kindergartens/KiKos were finished.
418 - red_star9 сентября 2025 г.
In most cases, children were the reason for the apartment in the first place, and the same was true for much of what went into the apartment, in terms of furnishings and appliances—made possible by both the biological fact of a baby being born, and the SED’s largesse.
417 - red_star9 сентября 2025 г.
The Western 'ownership society' is as much an unsustainable illusion as Corbusian mega-settlements of state socialism: both look solid, but are never far from melting into the air.
325 - red_star8 сентября 2025 г.
She also recited the familiar grievance of cramped inner courtyards (Hinterhöfe), and one-room apartments (the “Berliner rooms”) with tiny, almost lightless and airless windows (“Berliner windows”) looking out on the inner courtyards. The Berliner window was a “heritage of the capitalist past,” Schmidt claimed, “which cannot be wiped away in a day.”
323 - red_star8 сентября 2025 г.
This was a form of world revolution, of international socialism, and if socialism was to spread from Europe and become applicable throughout the world, it would have to do so in the timeless, cultureless, modern forms of prefabricated concrete homes.
324 - red_star8 сентября 2025 г.
ndeed, many foreign workers from countries such as Poland, Romania, and Cuba were welcomed to participate in the Marzahn construction site, not necessarily because of a labor shortage, but as a form of diplomacy that the GDR practiced to increase its cachet within the socialist and socialist-aligned world. In the sand pits and construction assembly lines, German workers worked alongside Poles, Cubans, Vietnamese, and even Red Army soldiers who took part in mandatory “subbotnik” labor in Marzahn.
321 - red_star8 сентября 2025 г.
Like the Swedes, Finland attempted where possible during the Cold War to position itself firmly between the Soviet Bloc and the capitalist West, able to hold diplomatic and economic relationships with both sides. In particular, the embrace of practical modernism in both furniture and architecture in Scandinavia—which became famous for designers like the Finn Alvar Aalto and brands like Lego and Ikea—carried over into the GDR and other Eastern Bloc countries such as Czechoslovakia.
317 - red_star8 сентября 2025 г.
Later, the Politburo mandated that four churches (Catholic and Lutheran) be added to the plan, all from prefabricated concrete, with a starkly modern and minimalist design.
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