palace

Today’s the day that Berlin’s “Palace of the Republic“, a GDR-era showcase of “socialist culture” has been completely demolished, finally. This is something that has been intensely debated, with a majority of Berlin inhabitants against demolition. But it was not to be: the gigantic structure, built between 1972 and 1976, to replace the Schloß on the “Marx-Engels Platz”, is gone forever. For over a decade, it sat in Berlin-Mitte, its modernist architectural style considered an eyesore and an unwelcome reminder of the recent, divided, past. Many feel that the failure to preserve this monument of socialist dictatorship is also a failure to acknowledge German reality before 1989. In 1983, Udo Lindenberg, whose song “Sonderzug Nach Pankow” (Special Train to Pankow, the residence of Erich “Honni” Honecker) was banned in the GDR, performed in the “Palast”: here’s “Girls from East Berlin”:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhssDLcFsd4[/youtube]