Berlin: Documentary “The Allee”: Stories of a Life

You can’t step into the same river twice, and a street is never the same. When we walk along it, it is always present – but we carry the memory of the past with us.

For the filmmaker Sven Boeck, it is his avenue, which has had different names at different times. For others it is other streets. Knut Elstermann, for example, wrote a book about Winsstrasse in Prenzlauer Berg, where he grew up. When I came to Berlin in the mid-80s, I was impressed by Warschauer Straße, in the shadow of the Narva light bulb factory, with its many corner bars for after-work drinkers. Warschauer Straße leads up to the Frankfurter Tor with the two towers built by Hermann Henselmann. And now we are back on Sven Boecks Allee, which will soon be called Frankfurter Allee. The names changed, from Stalinallee to Karl-Marx- and Frankfurter Allee – the west-east axis from Alexanderplatz to Lichtenberg remained the same. The U5, which opened in 1930 to connect the proletarian east to the center of Berlin, also runs under the avenue for a long stretch.

Sven Boeck had already made a film in 1991 about the avenue, its residents and its history. That was after the fall of communism; many of the residents at the time are no longer alive today. Like Gabriele Mucchi, the Italian painter and communist, he died in 2002 at the age of 103. A life in three centuries! About what happened after the fall of communism – the expropriation of the East – he said in amazement: “That no one went to the barricades!” The people in the GDR were extremely peaceful, just a moment ago they had been standing in front of churches with candles and ” No violence!” shouted – and now they should physically defend themselves against the injustice that happened to them?

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Sven Boeck also remembers November 1990. As the first measure after unification, the red-green Berlin Senate evacuated the squatted houses on Mainzer Strasse. He had never seen so many police officers at once before, and things were no longer peaceful!

»The Allee« is above all a biographical search for Boeck’s traces in the heart of Berlin. Uncompromisingly personal in his gesture, he interweaves his own childhood and youth with contemporary history. It begins with the memory of a warm summer night in 1981. He had just finished school, the graduation party took place behind the House for Electrical Engineering on Alexanderplatz, the avenue was almost empty in the middle of the night, and he walked along with two friends to the Strausberger Platz. They spoke and dreamed: “Together we will conquer the world!”

A week later he is summoned to school, which was actually behind him. The final newspaper that he had initiated was found to be downright anti-state. The euphoria was gone – and he never saw the two classmates with whom he had just felt connected in his big dream of the future again.

A basic feeling from which we live can change so quickly. Just now there was security and confidence, now there is oppression and worry. The GDR leadership was great at destroying dreams that it had once shared. When Boeck rides his bike down the avenue from Wedding (the old working-class district in the West), where he now lives, he notices the changes: “Every society uses the city for its own purposes.”

During the GDR era, Alexanderplatz was more of a concrete desert. When the demonstration on November 4, 1989 took place here, it was at the same time “the moment of greatest unity and its end” for the GDR. History teaches us dialectics – and often this is a bitter lesson. Boeck emphasizes: “We killed our state ourselves, others gutted it.”

Sometimes there is nothing left to do other than wait quietly for the images of yesteryear that have sunk into our minds to resurface. There is, for example, the “House of the Child” at Strausberger Platz 19, which was opened in 1954 as the first children’s department store in all of Germany. What about it was utopia, what was ideology? It’s hard to say, after all, you could buy things here that were otherwise rare: Matchbox cars, for example. The neoclassicism of Hermann Henselmann’s Stalinallee (“confectioner’s style”), say those who have traveled the world, can be found not only in Moscow, but also in Washington. It was in time.

Many celebrities lived at Strausberger Platz, including the children’s book author Alex Wedding, the wife of the writer F. C. Weiskopf, who died in the mid-1950s, until her death in 1966. Franz Fühmann also had an apartment here, but he hardly used it; he deliberately sought out the outskirts of Märkisch-Buchholz for his writing. But the coveted, luxuriously furnished apartments were not only given to celebrities; Sven Boeck’s aunt Lotte, a former rubble woman and tram driver, also lived here. Here too, social segregation is only a result of the post-reunification period.

The city’s pavement breathes under our footsteps, says the filmmaker, who uses archive images to show how much “the avenue” has changed over the decades. Overbuilding is one thing, changing residents is another. Some have died, others have moved away, and the small remainder that is still there from before has long been walking with a walker.

Boeck’s dramaturge also lives here; he visits her in her apartment. Of course it’s about films – about the two cinemas on the avenue, the “International” and the “Kosmos”. The “Kosmos” was legendary. Today it is no longer a cinema, you can rent it for events. In 1987, like every year, the Soviet Film Festival took place here – but this time under the banner of perestroika. Askoldow’s “The Commissar” from 1967 (which was immediately banned) was now shown here or Elem Klimo’s “Go and see” from 1985 about a childhood in the partisan fight against the German aggressors in World War II. The conclusion: war also kills the souls of those who survive it. The films shown here did not fit the SED’s ideological framework. But the perestroika enthusiasts let them breathe a sigh of relief: the lies of Stalinism are finally ending!

During his filmic hike, which is also a journey through time, Boeck approaches Lichtenberg train station, which was much more important in GDR times than it is today. The Road of Liberation also began here, once Reichsstraße 1, today it is called Alt-Friedrichsfelde, through which the Red Army came to Berlin. We hear in the film that anti-fascism no longer worked as a “social glue” and GDR society collapsed.

Same place, but always different times. And much that was weighed and found to be light disappeared. But probably too much of what was important but seems undesirable today. What lies hidden beneath the asphalt of the avenue in terms of a prematurely buried future? – to take up an idea from Heiner Müller about the premature “disposal” of GDR history.

At the end of his film, which is worth seeing and is quietly poetic, Boeck puts Gustav Mahler’s song: “I am lost to the world.” It seems to be the way of things. But the fact that hardly anyone perceives it as a loss and that the triumph of a memoryless present seems to be complete, is truly similar to that “leaden time” that was already so depressing at the end of the GDR. As Goethe said to Eckermann: “Time is a tyrant,” as blindly raging as it is destructive, always has been.

»Die Allee«, Germany 2024. Director and book: Sven Boeck. 94 mins https://www.alleefilm.de
The premiere will take place as part of an nd.Filmclub special on October 23rd. in the “Toni” cinema, with Paul Werner Wagner, Dr. Thomas Flierl, Sven Boeck and Klaus Fehler.