Still frame captured from a moving vehicle, showing a street section of Stalinallee in East Berlin in 1955. Monumental new buildings in the socialist-classical style frame the image on both left and right — those residential blocks that the GDR had conceived as a showpiece street of socialist reconstruction. In the foreground, a pre-war automobile rolls over cobblestones; cyclists and pedestrians animate the sidewalk, while ruins and low pre-war building stock are still visible in the background. The contrast between the representative new buildings and the remaining traces of war illustrates the propagandistically staged yet still incomplete reconstruction of the East Berlin city center. Stalinallee in 1955 was the GDR’s most important showcase for the socialist urban planning ideal — a deliberate counterpart to the Western economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder) reconstruction on the other side of the sector border.