Fifty Years ago today, on June 17, 1953, a spontaneous workers' demonstration triggered by a decrease in pay led to an uprising in the GDR, mainly in East Berlin. The main action in East Berlin was on the Stalinallee (Stalin Alley), later partly renamed Karl-Marx Allee.

The number of dead listed varies from 20 to 150, with 100 being a fairly good guess. Eighteeen death penalties are documented. The shooting of fourty soldiers of the Red Army for refusing to shoot on civilians, however, is a Western propagandy lie from the Cold War. True, however, is that there is still a monument for these 40 soldiers who never have been shot.

This was but the first of a series of uprisings over a couple of decades (Budapest, Prague, Peking) in which tanks of a communist army crushed, in each of these towns not only in a metaphorical sense, a rebellion from their own or allied nations' people.

For the music angle, when a part of the Stalinallee was renamed into Karl-Marx Allee, in 1961, (then) dissident-communist singer songwriter Wolf Biermann wrote the deeply sarcastic song (in the sense: Karl Marx is a too good name to pin on that awful street; Stalin is a much better fitting name)

Acht Argumente für die Beibehaltung des Namens "Stalinallee" für die Stalinallee
(Eight arguments for keeping the name "Stalinallee" for the Stalinallee)

And his third argument (verse) was:

Und als am 17. Juni
Manch Maurerbrigadier
Mit Flaschen schwer bewaffnet schrie
Da floß nicht nur das Bier
Ja, darum heißt sie auch STALINALLEE
Mensch, Junge, versteh
Und die Zeit ist passé!

(And when at the 17th of June
some builder work team leader
shouted, heavily armed with bottles,
then not only the beer did flow.
Yes, that's why it is called STALINALLEE.
My boy, understand,
and the time is gone)

Wolfgang