Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park in the East As both East and West began to reconstruct the city of Berlin post World War II, each side began to clash due to their differences in ideologies. Stalin saw East Berlin as a means to showcase the socialist statement through the use of monumental architecture as a demonstration of greatness of what should have been. Unlike the West, Stalin sought out in building a lasting impression on the East, in addition to presenting the attitude of corruption of materialist ideas in the West. Alan Balfour illustrates a comparison regarding the architectural past of German, particularly the similarities of the GDR’s building programme and the ambitions of Adolf Hilter, who was an admirer of the classical tradition. In 1938, Stalin wrote, “the artist who understands the “totality of social relationships” comes forth as the engineer of the human soul”, (Balfour, 1990, P160) “and like Hitler, he saw himself as the supreme artist of the state.” (Balfour, 1990, P160). Erica Carter alliterates, …show more content…
Urban form, first, had been made to embody the humanist ideal of a fully integrated socialist citizenry divided neither by the functional separations of urban life in the West (work vs. leisure and politics vs. culture) nor by hierarchical divisions of class, gender, sexuality, or race. The only hierarchy, second, that was admitted in this Utopian scheme was that of the Party and state over the individual, and that authority relation was embodied in the physical structures of East Berlin primarily through privileging of the city center as a symbolic core of city and nation.” (Carter, 1997,