MAYBE it’s because I was a tourist. I might have been giddy with the joy of a holiday and perhaps I’d had too much beer and bauernfrühstück that day, but as we walked along Strasse der Pariser Kommune in East Berlin, I was struck by how pleasing the old Soviet-era high-rise blocks were.
We were in the area to look at residential housing, but not of the concrete kind. Instead, we had journeyed to Ostbanhof so we could see the grand Karl-Marx-Allee (formerly Stalinallee) where my guide book promised “bombastic socialist architecture”.
That famous street was built long and wide to accommodate Communist May Day parades. The red flags and grey men have vanished now, but the street still has grandeur, lent to it not by ideology but by its buildings with their creamy polished exteriors, tall twinkling windows and elaborate towers.
But to get there from the station, you need to walk past a DDR-era housing estate. If a Glasgow guidebook told me to reach my destination by wandering through Possilpark or Castlemilk I’d throw it in the bin, and yet there were no such worries about the East Berlin estates.
They didn’t have the windswept menace that so many of our high-rise areas do: there were no boarded windows and no gangs of wee neds. Instead, the buildings were freshly-painted and neat, and surrounded by greenery.
A Glasgow housing estate can be desolate and threatening, but there was none of that in Berlin. I was looking at it as a tourist, of course, not a resident, and perhaps the flats are indeed damp and cramped inside but, from the street, they looked clean and cared for.
Is this because Germany has more money than we do? Or were these blocks spruced up because the authorities knew tourists would wander past on their way to Karl-Marx-Allee? Hardly.
These blocks were built in the Communist era and the trees in front of them had taken a while to grow so this had nothing to do with Berlin’s recent popularity.
The blocks were built for workers by a government who, although plagued with hideous defects and a rotten ideology, wanted to celebrate and cultivate their workers, so they coughed up the cash to give them decent housing and made the place relatively pleasant.
There are trees everywhere. Some would say they were planted to conceal the lowly, dirty workers from the rest of us, but I say trees are more pleasing to look at than yet more concrete, and why should “leafy” only be a compliment when it precedes “West End”? So the streets and pathways are lined with greenery and the blocks still stand today, freshly-painted and strong.
Not so in Glasgow. Our high-rise estates weren’t given trees. Often they weren’t even given shops, surgeries or bus stops. Neither were they placed in the heart of the city, as in East Berlin, where you can find them beside impressive streets and major train stations. Instead they were shoved to the outskirts.
And instead of enduring, they soon began to fall apart. Lifts broke down and damp crept in. We weren’t glorifying our workers. We were just getting the scum out of the way. So our high-rise estates are often decrepit and dangerous and many are now being demolished.
It seems the councils have finally cottoned on to what residents have been telling them for years. But as these monstrosities are gradually knocked down there are some – and I’ll bet it’s mainly people who don’t live there – who are feeling a pang of sentimental fondness for them. I might have been guilty of this myself in East Berlin, indulging in Ostalgie by proxy.
Sentimentality should not be allowed to interfere with tangible things like lighting, warmth, dampness, rattling windows and whether the lift can be guaranteed to get you to the ground floor in safety. But it often does.
People sighed for the old slum tenements and now they fret over the loss of the high-rises.
As someone who grew up in a cold council house on an ugly estate I want to say, “Wake up and smell the damp coffee.”
Given my desire for a bit of honesty and realism – as long as it’s in Glasgow and not Berlin – I was pleased by Sighthill (BBC2, Tuesday).
This documentary followed some of the last-remaining residents of the Pinkston Drive towers before the blocks were emptied for demolition.
I was ready to wince, imagining we’d see an old dear sighing for the loss of her fine view from the 19th floor, or some rosy-cheeked scamps getting exercise dodging the urine puddles in the stairwell.
I loathe the sentimental celebration of grime and decay as being somehow hearty and honest. It’s always used to smooth and pat the working class.
The boast on my estate in the 1980s was that you lived in “a bought house”, even though the thing you’d bought was damp and miserable.
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