“Alexanderplatz is both the GDR capital’s architectural centre and the city’s central point of attraction and a favourite meeting place where thousands of Berliners and people visiting the city meet every day at the World Time Clock for a walk in the new socialist city centre.”
(From the 1980 guidebook, Berlin: Capital of the GDR)
Twenty-three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, people still use the clock as a meeting point. The House of the Teachers is still adorned with a suitably inspiring, socialist mural, and the television tower still gazes down upon the whole scene. But much else has changed on the Alexanderplatz. The old Centrum Department Store is now the Galeria Kaufhof and got a facelift eight years ago, the Pressecafe is now a steak house, and the old Interhotel Stadt Berlin has had a couple of new names even in the time I have been in the city. Even some post-Wall changes, such as the text from Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz that once graced the facades of the buildings on Karl-Marx-Allee have now faded, although if you look closely you can still see the outline of some of the letters washed away by time and the elements.
In the past ten years the re-development of Alexanderplatz and the surrounding area has accelerated, with the opening of the enormous Alexa shopping mall and the new Saturn building on the edge of the square. The tram lines have been re-laid and all the major international shops and fast-food outlets can be found somewhere around the square. But if the area is no longer a “new socialist city centre”, the echoes of the German Democratic Republic and the brave new heart of (one half) of the city that was built out of the ruins of the Second World War in the 1960s can still be heard.
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Under a Grey Sky 
