Berlin's 2 Stalinist buildings document the Soviet-influenced architecture that shaped East Berlin in the early 1950s. The Heizkraftwerk Rüdersdorfer Straße — a monumental heating plant — and Franz Ehrlich's Broadcasting Centre Berlin both embody the "national in form, socialist in content" doctrine that preceded the GDR's turn toward industrialised Modernism.
These buildings share massive proportions, symmetrical facades, and decorative flourishes drawn from classical vocabulary — architecture designed to project the authority and permanence of the new socialist state. Their survival in contemporary Berlin provides a physical record of the ideological competition that shaped the divided city.
