Battle of Berlin. After the war ended, the boundary between the US and Soviet occupation sectors ran between Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg, with Friedrichshain in the east and Kreuzberg in the west. This became a sealed border between East and West Berlin when the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. Stalinallee (previously Große Frankfurter Straße) was built in Friedrichshain in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a prestige project; the architecture of its 'workers' palaces' is strongly reminiscent of the ostentatious Soviet-era Moscow boulevards and is sometimes mockingly described as Zuckerbäckerstil ('wedding cake style'). The 1953 uprising had its origins in these construction projects, as increased work quotas led to protests that soon spread throughout East Germany, and were only put down by armed Soviet intervention. In the period of De-Stalinization following the Soviet leader's death, the boulevard was renamed Karl-Marx-Allee at one end and Frankfurter Allee at the other. From this time onwards, Friedrichshain often featured on East Berlin's cultural map: in 1962 the Kosmos, East Germany's largest cinema, was opened, followed in 1981 by the country's most ambitious swimming and sports complex, the Sport- und Erholungszentrum. Neither of these buildings serve their original function today. Lifestyle In the course of the changes following the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the free elections in March 1990 and leading up to German reunification the following October, Friedrichshain began to develop a reputation as a young, dynamic district, thanks in part to low rents and the many empty apartments that also attracted the attention of squatters including many from former West Berlin. On 14 November that year, Friedrichshain experienced violent clashes when hundreds of squatters were forcefully evicted from houses in Mainzer Straße by police acting on the orders of the Senate of the recently united city, an act which would trigger the fall of the governing coalition when the Green Party withdrew in protest. In the following years further squatters were evicted under the hardline conservative Senator for the Interior, but others were able to buy the houses they lived in, and they remain a distinct (counter-)cultural influence in the district to this day. The fight against eviction remains a daily struggle for the last squats still standing: in October 2020, the anarco-queer-feminist squat Liebig34 on Liebigstrasse got evicted. At the moment the bar Syndicat on Boxagenerplatz is under pressing threat as well. Alongside the neighboring districts