STALIN AND THE BEAR: A CLOAK-AND-DAGGER STORY
This Week in Berlin: 14 November 1961
On this day - or rather night as the following events played well after sunset on November 13 - the main artery of East Berlin, a symbol for the Communist re-birth of the city, and until today the widest street in German capital lost both its name and its symbolic patron.
Stalinallee burst into being on Berlin’s maps on December 21, 1949. That day Josef Stalin, the murderous, treacherous but officially still revered leader of the Soviet Union, celebrated his 70th birthday. To celebrate the day and to show their unshaken belief in his endless ideological wisdom, Berlin’s authorities in the Soviet Sector of the city decided to re-name one of the main streets in his honour.
Ironically, Frankfurter Allee (the old Große Frankfurter Straße) was still a craggy, grey sea of ruins left by the unstoppable T34 tanks and the Red Army artillery barrage. Several months earlier, though, Friedrich Ebert, East Berlin’s Oberbürgermeister (Governing Mayor), announced the official plan to rebuild the city. In a document known as the Generalplan zum Wiederaufbau von Berlin. And the new Stalinallee was to become its backbone.
Stalin got not only the name - a nearly five-metre-tall bronze statue of the “Great Leader” was unveiled on top of a granite plinth (other sources also have it of marble, concrete or sandstone) on 3 August, 1951. This gift from the Soviet Union, presented in anticipation of the Third World Youth and Students Festival about to take place in the city that year, was placed temporarily between Andreasstraße and Koppenstraße.
Its actual destination was the soon-to-be-refurbished Strausberger Platz. But the bronze Stalin never made it to the square.
Three years after his death, in 1956, the communist dictator was finally denounced as a tyrant, a murderer and a criminal that he had been, and his cult came to an abrupt end. Literally overnight, on 13-14 November 1961, his name was erased from the streets of East Berlin: Stalinallee became Karl-Marx-Allee (its western section) and Frankfurter Allee (from Frankfurter Tor towards its the eastern end). The German term “Nacht und Nebel Aktion” (literally, Night and Fog Campaign, or “cloak-and-dagger operation”) rarely fitted the bill so precisely as it did that night.
There was no more room for the bronze statue either. Toppled from its plinth, it was transported to a factory hall of East Berlin’s main publicly-owned construction enterprise, VEB Deutsche Bau-Union, and prepared for melting.
One of the workers, Gerhard Wolf, defying strict orders not to take any souvenirs, smuggled out an ear and a piece of Stalin’s moustache. For decades he kept them in secret: he and his colleagues had been explicitly forbidden to take anything from the shed in which the statue had been destroyed. After 1989 and German Re-Unification, Wolf had both pieces put on display at the “Café Sybille” in Karl-Marx-Allee. Not far from the Stalindenkmal’s original location. The café - which still exists and has lost none of its charm - holds a small exhibition devoted to the history of the vanished street. And proudly presents the bronze Stalin’s mementos (albeit these might be replicas - the current status is “unknown”).
Speaking of bronze. The rest of the precious metal retrieved from the Soviet dictator’s effigy was used to make something far more fun than an oversized moustachioed man.
Today, you will find most of the bronze from the Stalin statue at the Tierpark-Berlin, the city’s eastern zoo in Berlin-Lichtenberg. You might not be able to recognise, though. The giant dictator was transformed into charming animal figures: bronze bears, monkeys and goats which today decorate the Tierpark – the largest animal park in Europe – were, willy-nilly, Stalin’s farewell gift to Berlin.
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