In his 1901 article ‘Where to Begin’, Lenin likened the newspaper to the scaffolding surrounding a building under construction. ‘It marks,’ he wrote, ‘the contours of the structure, and facilitates communication between workers, enabling them to distribute work and view the common results of organised labour.’

For much of the pandemic I have spent my time on the eleventh floor of an East Berlin plattenbau (concrete panel) block that flanks Karl-Liebknecht Straße and Rosa-Luxemburg Straße, looking over Alexanderplatz and the TV tower. Next to the apartment block stands the old GDR Press Café, currently enclosed in scaffolding and awnings obscuring the building from view.

On the occasion that a particularly strong wind blows down one of the many arterial roads surrounding the area part of the awning slips down, revealing a flash of red beneath the shroud. This colour in an otherwise relentlessly grey landscape comes from a mural by Willi Neubert entitled ‘Die Presse als Organisator’ (The Press as Organiser), which covers three sides of the old café, depicting a vision of the press that we can no longer see.

The Press Café was opened in 1973 along with the Berliner Verlag, or ‘Press House’ building, which made up part of the redesign of the Alexanderplatz. At the time, the building housed some of the more prominent East German print publications such as the Berliner Zeitung, the tabloid BZ am Abend (later becoming the Berliner Kurier in 1990), the women’s magazine Fur Dich, and illustrated weekly Freie Welt. At the foot of this 17-storey building, with its dramatic stair tower and revolving sign, sits the low-rise café, which was a popular meeting place for journalists who would come to view publications from around the world at a time where access to these were restricted.

Neubert’s The Press as Organiser can be placed alongside murals like Walter Womacka’s ‘Our Life’ on the House of Teachers on the other side of the square, or Bert Heller’s ‘From the Life of the Peoples of the Soviet Union’ across Cafe Moscow, on nearby Karl-Marx Allee. All perform an illustrative and utopian function, describing the purpose of the building (publishing, teaching, travel) and constructing a socialist vision of these aspects of society.

Since 1991, the Press Café mural has been covered up by a sign for an Argentinian Steak house called Escados. Reflecting the ambivalence of the city of Berlin to deal with the cultural heritage of the GDR period, the mural was not destroyed, as was the case with the Palace of the Republic down on the other side of Karl-Liebknecht Strasse, but instead concealed by plastic cladding.

When the building was listed in 2015, the Monuments Office report commented on the work’s ‘dynamic presentation’, which gives the otherwise functional pavilion an expressive and exciting tone, creating a focal point for the new Alexanderplatz. The report goes on, however, to condemn it for illustrating the concept of unity between the press and the state. But for the last two years the US real estate company Tishman Speyer has been restoring the building back to many of its original features, from the lettering on the side to the mural itself – which will be revealed for the first time in 30 years in spring 2021.

Aside from official reports and notions of public heritage, the mural shows something much more complex and urgent. This is an image of a socialist press, not only as collective propaganda or agitator but, as the title suggests, as an organising force. Large hands grasp an assortment of printed matter from which glimpses of names and titles can be seen: ‘die Rote’ (Fahne, the Red Flag, the pre-Hitler Communist newspaper), ‘Rosa’ (Luxemburg), and ‘takus’ (Spartakusbund, the revolutionary Spartacus League formed during the First World War), to name a few. It shows reporters, street vendors, and the technical aspect of printing, behind which a red-faced Marx looks on (his depiction was criticised at the time for its rosy hue).

There is an urgency in the mural – the people in it are propelled by bold lines of colour, onwards through production towards action. The emphasised hands are reminiscent of a famous John Heartfield image that appeared on the front of Die Rote Fahne on the day of the 1928 elections, in which the hand of the workers is grasping toward the reader, compelling them on to anti-fascist resistance. The captions under it read: ‘Your hand has five fingers, with five (fingers) you grab your enemy! Vote list five Communist Party!’

Among the many murals and pieces of public art that Neubert created over his career is an earlier enamel mural in Halle (Saale) called the ‘The Press as Collective Organiser’ (1964), on the side of Die Freiheit (Freedom) offices, the paper of the ruling SED in the GDR. I have only been able to find one image of this piece, as it was destroyed shortly after reunification – but it depicts a very different vision of the function of the press.

In her illuminating thesis ‘Visual arts in the urban environment in the German Democratic Republic’, Jessica Jenkin identifies this mural as the first time where Neubert used a ‘plakativ’ or ‘poster-like’ effect in his public works, an approach that used montage composition and the suspension of scale and perspective. In this mural, the compositions of society are enclosed around a central figure that bears an unreadable expression, holding the Freiheit with the byline ‘Peace and Socialism’, and looking over a society of harmony and industry. In comparison to the mural on the Press Café, an expressive cacophony of lines and movement, the piece in Halle reveals a clear and authoritarian distinction between the official press and the people.

In the first vignette of One Way Street by Walter Benjamin (published the same year as Heartfield’s Rote Fahne cover), he writes that literary effectiveness can only occur through the strict alternation between writing and action, and that inconspicuous forms such as leaflets, newspapers and placards do this better than the ‘pretentious universal gesture of the book’. Neubert’s Press Café mural reflects this idea, rather than a bureaucratic unity between the press and the state. It shows dissenting ephemera in many forms, produced quickly and cheaply, read and passed on in urgency.

The print material in the mural refers to the period of the German Revolution and the Weimar Republic, not to the official press of GDR, which was housed in the Berliner Verlag building when the mural was created in 1973. In the interwar period, mass print culture inundated Berlin on a scale not seen by any other city in Germany – there were an estimated 125 newspapers in Berlin in 1925, despite common paper shortages, and currency devaluations.

Most prominent in the mural is Die Rote Fahne, which was founded by Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and others in the Spartakus League in 1918, which went on to become the central paper of the KPD. The paper, at first sporadically published, played a key role in the German Revolution of 1918-1919. It later became notoriously turgid in tone, and was increasingly aimed at party functionaries. In 1924, the KPD set out a survey to its readership called ‘What’s wrong with Die Rote Fahne?’, with one person responding that ‘The Rote Fahne is not writing for but about the workers’ and ‘the writing is rubbish!’

The  KPD subsequently set up a tabloid, Die Welt am Abend, in 1922, to get away from the sectarianism and jargonism of the party paper; this was then brought up by Willi Münzenberg a few years later and transformed into the most popular communist paper. By 1929, the paper had a distribution of 229,000, which not only outstripped the Rote Fahne‘s circulation of 37,000, but also that of most other newspapers of the period.

The mural draws on this sense of popular engagement in the communist print culture of those years. Letters just visible on the edges of the newssheets displayed in the mural allude to popular communist publications such as Münzenberg’s Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ), which despite its relationship with the Soviet Union, was by no means a party organ. The paper combined an approach that did not shy away from reporting on all aspects of workers’ lives, as well bringing its readers avant-garde works such as the Dadaist John Heartfield’s powerful anti-Nazi photomontages. The AIZ developed in a high circulation in a short period: in 1933 around 500,000 copies were sold weekly.

All these descriptions come from fragments of information and old photographs of the Press Café – the restored mural has not yet been unveiled. The final photograph I found was taken just before the mural was covered up. It’s from the November 1989 protests for GDR reform, and shows a group of protesters standing outside the café with a banner that reads ‘No new language but a new cuisine – get rid of the bland media stew’. This makes a striking contrast with the most recent image of the café, a bland architectural rendering of the new complex in which the mural becomes a mere texture on a whitewashed façade.

With its imminent unveiling we can only hope that the image of the Press as Organiser pierces through attempts to turn the Alexanderplatz area into an increasingly capitalist space, and that this image of the past can serve as a critical space in the present.