‘Here Beats the Heart of the Young Socialist State’: 1970s' East Berlin as Socialist Bloc Tourist Destination: Fid-Bau Portal

‘Here Beats the Heart of the Young Socialist State’: 1970s' East Berlin as Socialist Bloc Tourist Destination

Standley, Michelle

Drawing on the archival records of East Berlin's main tourist organisations, Berlin-Information and Travel Agency GDR-Berlin, this article examines a short phase in East Berlin's life as a dynamic tourist destination. It begins by exploring the vision of the GDR authorities when they made plans for the new central area focused on the Alexanderplatz in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and when they introduced visa-free travel in the early 1970s. It then goes on to examine the actual engagement with the space by socialist travelers during the peak of East Berlin's period as an important Socialist Bloc tourist destination in the 1970s. Existing scholarship on the GDR's experiment with visa-free travel in the 1970s has focused singularly on the shopping and smuggling activities of socialist tourists to the GDR. The historical record, however, reveals a more nuanced story. Socialist tourists, I argue, saw visa-free travel as more than a mere occasion to acquire goods that were scarce at home and East Berlin as more than a mere marketplace. East Berlin, I suggest, offered socialist tourists a robust tourist culture and an opportunity for Socialist Bloc authorities to fulfill their end of the socialist social contract by extending the privileges of leisure travel and of urban leisure culture to ordinary citizens of the Socialist Bloc.