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The House of Electro-Technology stretches like a felled skyscraper along the northern edge of Berlins Alexanderplatz, limiting views and impeding traffic in the heart of the German capital. The shopworn relic of the former East Germany, an assembly of pre-fabricated glass and aluminum squares, has been called clunky and dehumanizing. Its owners say its outdated and should be replaced. Christine Edmaier wants to save it.

We lose an important part of our history when we tear these buildings down, said Edmaier, head of Berlins Chamber of Architects. Its not about whether theyre beautiful.

A quarter century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eastern Europes transition to democracy and capitalism, while largely successful, remains a work in progress. Even a generation later, the legacy of communism continues to weigh on the region as governments grapple with issues ranging from the structure of their economies to the quality of food to the fate of brutalist buildings that clash with newer steel and glass structures.

Berlin is battling over how much of its communist architecture to retain, restore, or destroy. The city parliament is set to vote as early as September on a new plan for the square immortalized in films as diverse as Rainer Werner Fassbinders 1980 Berlin Alexanderplatz and the 2004 Matt Damon vehicle The Bourne Supremacy.

The plan could involve offering landmark protection to buildings on the 20-acre (8-hectare) Alexanderplatz. The popular shopping destination sits in the heart of East Berlin and is the now-combined citys busiest transportation hub -- a tangle of underground, elevated and street-level train, bus and tram stops.

Investors who bought properties expecting theyd be able to build high-rises are worried their plans may be scuttled by landmarking rules. Joerg Lammersen, head of the Berlin operations of TLG Immobilien GmbH, which owns the 45-year-old House of Electro-Technology and four other buildings on Alexanderplatz, says the city risks falling behind other European capitals by preserving too many East German relics.

We cant afford to keep the square as a museum, its too central for that, Lammersen said, motioning toward the monotonous 10-story facade of the Electro-Technology building, which has been only marginally improved by new window louvres and entrances. The architecture is not a highlight.

Dallas-based Lone Star Funds in 2012 bought TLG as part of a 1.1 billion-euro ($1.5 billion) property deal -- and is said to be planning a share offering. Starwood Capital Group LLC, based in Greenwich, Connecticut, holds a stake in the Park Inn hotel on the square. Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) is the biggest tenant at the House of Electro-Technology.

The area is best known for the needle-shaped television tower that has become a Berlin icon. Built in 1969 to mark East Germanys 20th anniversary, the 368-meter (1,207-foot)-tall tower is still the countrys highest structure and can be seen across the city. Otherwise, Alexanderplatz has few memorable characteristics other than its daunting size and the jumble of large, socialist-era buildings that now house chain stores, fast-food restaurants, and fashion discounters.

The prefabricated blocks, built with great fanfare by East Germanys star architects in the 1960s and 1970s, still speak volumes about their history. Theres the House of Travel, former headquarters of the state-owned travel agency and airline -- within walking distance of the heavily guarded Death Strip of the Berlin Wall that kept citizens penned in. The House of the Teacher has a Diego-Riviera-style mural depicting scientists, athletes and a woman holding a baby. At the 37-story mirror-glass Park Inn, the flagship of the state-owned Interhotel chain, all the rooms were bugged and prostitutes were hired to spy on guests.

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25 Years After Communism, Eyesores Spur Landmark Debate

Wojciech Jaruzelski led Poland and its Communist Party from the early 1980s to the end of the Cold War. Wojciech Jaruzelski eventually saw Poland become a democracy.

Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the survivor of a Siberian labor camp, was an unlikely servant to the Soviet Union and its communist ideology.

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Poland's last communist leader, the general in tinted glasses who was best known for his 1981 martial law crackdown on the Solidarity union, died Sunday at age 90 after a long illness.

Born into a patriotic and Catholic Polish milieu, Jaruzelski and his family were deported to Siberia by the Red Army during World War II. That harsh land took his father's life and inflicted snow blindness on Jaruzelski, forcing him to wear dark glasses.

Despite his suffering at Soviet hands, Jaruzelski faithfully imposed Moscow's will on his subjugated nation until communism crumbled across the region in 1989.

Poland is still deeply divided over whether to view Jaruzelski as a traitor who did Moscow's dirty work or as a patriot who made an agonizing decision to spare the country the bloodshed of a Soviet invasion.

Jaruzelski stirs up these emotions for his defining act: His 1981 imposition of martial law, a harsh crackdown aimed at crushing the pro-democracy Solidarity movement founded months earlier by Lech Walesa.

Commenting on his death, Walesa called him a "great man of the generation of betrayal."

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Wojciech Jaruzelski remembered as last Communist leader in Poland

Wojciech Jaruzelski, the expressionless Polish general behind dark glasses who imposed martial law in 1981 to crush the independent trade union Solidarity and nearly eight years later participated in the negotiated revolution that led to the fall of communism in Poland, died May 25 at a military hospital in Warsaw. He was 90.

A hospital spokesman announced the death. The general had a stroke this month and had previously been treated for cancer.

Gen. Jaruzelski, the scion of landed gentry, was deported to the Soviet Union as a forced laborer in 1941 and returned to Poland later in World War II as a committed communist in the ranks of the Soviet-created Polish First Army.

Starting in the 1950s, he rose rapidly in the military and political establishments of the new Peoples Republic of Poland. After the Soviet-backed governments fall in 1989, Gen. Jaruzelskis past was at the center of post-communist debates about historical reckoning and justice.

Gen. Jaruzelski was accused of being Moscows stooge, and his political foes repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempted to have him punished for his role in the bloody suppression of protests against the system. He defended himself as a patriot who was forced into the impossible choice of smothering Solidarity himself or watching the Soviet army do it. He said he feared a Soviet invasion would result in carnage; his critics dismissed that as a convenient mirage.

I served the Poland that existed, Gen. Jaruzelski said in one of his many exculpatory assessments of his record.

Some saw something incorruptible in the ascetic and disciplined officer.

He was perhaps the only man in Poland who was a Communist because he believed in communism, journalist Tina Rosenberg wrote in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Haunted Land: Facing Europes Ghosts After Communism. Even Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, the generals onetime nemesis, thought Gen. Jaruzelski loved his country but was born in the wrong era.

A young nationalist aristocrat

Wojciech Witold Jaruzelski (pronounced VOI-chekh, VEE-told, yah-roo-ZEL-skee) was born July 6, 1923, and grew up on an estate in eastern Poland. Local peasants bowed to the family as they passed in their carriage on the way to Sunday Mass, he recalled.

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Wojciech Jaruzelski, Polands last communist leader, dies at 90

Faced with the party's worst-ever poll performance, Congress President Sonia Gandhi today said that "staunch secularism" and "socialist economics" were their "core beliefs" and noted that these values of Nehruvianism are being "fundamentally challenged by some in the prevailing political climate".

While the party encourages involvement of the private sector in wealth generation and economic growth, it remains "profoundly wedded to Nehru's concern for the weakest sections" of society, she said at an event to mark the 50th death anniversary of former Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru here.

The four pillars of Nehruvianism-- democratic institution-building, staunch secularism, socialist economics and a foreign policy of non-alignment-- that were integral to a vision of Indianness are being "fundamentally challenged by some in the prevailing political climate", she said while stressing that these still formed the core of Congress's beliefs.

Gandhi at the same time said she is not suggesting that Congress is stuck in a time warp and merely repeating the conventional wisdom of 50 years ago as "Nehru himself, as a man with an open and questioning mind, would have evolved with the times, even while remaining anchored in his core beliefs".

Her comments, indicating a left of the Centre tilt, comes at a time when Narendra Modi has assumed charge as Prime Minister of the country, heading a government which has a decisive majority of its own.

In the internal meetings of Congress, party leaders have maintained that corporates and the media fully backed BJP in the just-concluded Lok Sabha polls.

On secularism, Gandhi told the audience of mostly Congress leaders, including party Vice President Rahul Gandhi, that while Nehru strived to prevent partition, "when it occurred, he never accepted the logic that since Pakistan had ostensibly been created for India's Muslims, what remained was a state for Hindus".

Gandhi's impassioned praise of the Nehruvian vision comes at a time when the efficacy of that model is being questioned by sections of the media following BJP's landslide victory which reduced Congress to its lowest tally since Independence of just 44 seats in Lok Sabha.

She said Nehru lived by his conviction that India belonged to all who had contributed to its history and civilisation and that the majority community had a special obligation to protect the rights and promote the well-being of the minorities in the country.

She rued that it has become "fashionable today to decry Nehruvian socialism as a corrupt and inefficient system" that condemned India to many years of modest growth levels.

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'Nehruvian Legacy of Secularism, Socialism Core Beliefs'

New Delhi, May 27: Faced with the party's worst-ever poll performance, Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Tuesday said that "staunch secularism" and "socialist economics" were their "core beliefs" and noted that these values of Nehruvianism are being "fundamentally challenged by some in the prevailing political climate".

While the party encourages involvement of the private sector in wealth generation and economic growth, it remains "profoundly wedded to Nehru's concern for the weakest sections" of society, she said at an event to mark the 50th death anniversary of former Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.

The four pillars of Nehruvianism-- democratic institution -building, staunch secularism, socialist economics and a foreign policy of non-alignment-- that were integral to a vision of Indianness are being "fundamentally challenged by some in the prevailing political climate", she said while stressing that these still formed the core of Congress's beliefs.

Gandhi at the same time said she is not suggesting that Congress is stuck in a time warp and merely repeating the conventional wisdom of 50 years ago as "Nehru himself, as a man with an open and questioning mind, would have evolved with the times, even while remaining anchored in his core beliefs".

Her comments, indicating a left of the Centre tilt, comes at a time when Narendra Modi has assumed charge as Prime Minister of the country, heading a government which has a decisive majority of its own.

In the internal meetings of Congress, party leaders have maintained that corporates and the media fully backed BJP in the just-concluded Lok Sabha polls.

On secularism, Gandhi told the audience of mostly Congress leaders, including party Vice President Rahul Gandhi, that while Nehru strived to prevent partition, "when it occurred, he never accepted the logic that since Pakistan had ostensibly been created for India's Muslims, what remained was a state for Hindus".

"Nehru stood for an idea of India that embraced every religion, caste, ethnicity and language. Indian National Congress remains fundamentally rooted in such a conception of India," she added.

PTI

Story first published: Tuesday, May 27, 2014, 17:50 [IST]

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Nehruvian legacy of secularism, socialism core beliefs: Sonia Gandhi