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A socialist boulevard of great significance, the Karl-Marx-Alee was built by a citizen of East Germany between the years 1952 and 1960 in Berlin Friedrichshain and Mitte. The boulevard bears the name of the famous German philosopher and social thinker Karl Marx. The boulevard was known as Stalinallee from 1949 to 1961 and was a part of the project which aimed at reconstruction of Germany post-WWII. Karl-Marx-Alee was designed by the architects Hermann Henselmann, Hartmann, Hopp, Leucht, Paulick and Souradny with the motive of providing comfortable apartments for common workers, restaurants, a large cinema, hotel, café etc. Karl-Marx Alee stretches to a length of nearly 2 kilometer and is dotted with famous eight-storey buildings structured in the manner of a wedding-cake style, a typical of the Stalinist architecture. The most famous of the buildings in the alley are the two domed towers on Frankurter Tor. In the middle of 1953, Karl-Marx Alee (then Stalinallee) became the hotbed of the worker uprising which threatened to ransack peace completely out of the infant country. The Uprising was lead by builders and construction workers protesting against the communist government. The revolt was repressed brutally with Soviet tanks and soldiers leading to the death of no fewer than 125 people. In the later years the streets of Karl-Marx Alee were paraded by thousands of soldiers to commemorate East Germany's annual May Day. The purported reason for this annual affair was to highlight the power and might of the communist government. Since then Karl-Marx Alee has evoked responses in plenty; one of the famous ones coming from Philip Johnson, a postmodernist, who called it 'Europe's Last great Street'. The years that followed the reunification of Germany saw many of the building in Karl-Marx Alee being restored.
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