WE hope you enjoyed the first week's instalment of our travels around the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR). We have had really positive feedback, thank you.

Over the next few weeks, we will continue sharing stories from our travels and if you’d like to read more you can via the Red Tourists blog available at www.redtourists.com.

This week we focus on the next part of our “Redcation,” where we visited the famous DDR planned city of Stalinstadt/Eisenhuttenstadt.

After a busy morning around the memorial prison, we hit the road from Berlin towards Stalinstadt. This journey takes about one-and-a-half hours and gives you a chance to explore the beautiful East German countryside.

Stalinstadt is a must for any Red Tourist in East Germany, a socialist planned city built around the local steel mill and conceived with the GDR’s 16 principles of urban development at its heart.

It was the first new German town built after the war, with many people settling here during its development in the 1950s and ’60s.  It was built as the “first socialist city on German soil.”

During de-stalinisation in 1961, it was renamed Eisenhuttenstadt. Like much of East Germany, reunification led to privatisation of the steel mill where most of the 12,000 employees lost their jobs, leading to over 20,000 people leaving the town in a short period of time.

The Main Street has a variety of shops and restaurants as well as easy parking. Sadly, we missed out on the local museum, which is shut on Mondays.

The Lindenallee (Lime Avenue) still has original sculptures as part of the water fountain, as shown below.

Make sure you find the beautiful Produktion im Frieden (Production in Peace) created by Walter Womacka in 1965. This building was designed by Otto Lopp and Otto Schnabel and was constructed in 1958-1960 and now houses a store and library, pictured below.

While walking throughout the impressive housing estates, we found the first of many Soviet memorials across East Germany. This particular war cemetery contains the graves of 64 Soviet soldiers who fell  fighting for Eisenhuttenstadt in 1945 as well as 4,000 Soviet POWs who died in the camp Stalag III B. (For more information about the Soviet War memorials, see https://www.tracesofwar.com/).

However, a lazy stroll around this impressive city allows you to take in the housing and the murals as well as the said Soviet memorial. It was a stunning day when we got there, and so we treated ourselves to a delicious ice cream from Crema and Cioccolato on a bench near the local Die Linke office.

A fun fact to end our article is that in 2011 Tom Hanks visited the town and subsequently an amusing video below was produced.

That’s the end of the second instalment of our red tourist diary. Thank you for reading and we hope you are enjoying it.
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