In the Victoria and Albert Museum’s rather timely exhibition Cold War Modern, there is a section that might tell the tale of two cities. In one, tall, ornamented, buildings flank a massive, processionary street. In the other, simple concrete blocks with merry flashes of colour are arranged like a village, surrounded by greenery. In the first, children play in their own allotted place, no adults allowed. In the second, play is contained in the home, under a parent’s watchful eye. Two cities it could be, but it isn’t. We are in the 1950s and this is Berlin.

After the Soviet blockade and the Western airlift of 1948-49, Berlin, though not yet bisected by its notorious wall, was already a city divided. Relations between the two sides were getting chillier. Owing to the bitterness of the eastern front, the Soviet attitude to Germany was more aggressive than that of the other Allies, particularly the US. The Americans aimed for “deNazification” and democratisation. As well as economic and industrial reconstruction, they set up cultural programmes to involve the German people in building their own future. For the Soviets, there was no such pussyfooting. Reeducation would be imposed on the people of East Germany.

Reconstruction of the devastated city was urgently needed, but the two sides had very different ideas of how to do it. At the International Congress of Modern Architecture in 1949 in Bergamo, Italy, the Polish architect Helena Syrkus – formerly an enthusiastic Modernist – threw down the gauntlet by denouncing Modernism as disrespectful of the past, and hailing the new Socialist Realist style, with its monumental classical styling, as the future. She got short shrift from her former colleagues.

In East Berlin, the authorities reestablished their city centre away from the Brandenburg Gate and farther east towards the bomb-devastated Friedrichshain area. The long, wide street Frankfurter Allee (renamed Stalinallee as a birthday present to the Soviet leader in 1949) was the focal point, and it was here that the East German authorities wielded one of their most striking propaganda weapons in this new Cold War – architecture.

The new build at Stalinallee, overseen by the respected East German architect Hermann Henselmann, was trumpeted as a national project. It was meant to be social housing for those whose homes had been destroyed. A lottery was held for Berliners, who could contribute their own labour on site for a chance to win a flat in the completed complex. In fact, only some of the apartments went to workers –

prominent figures in the arts and significant others made up the rest of the community – it was a flagship project meant to proclaim the power and priorities of the regime, after all. The build went up in record time, around four years – fuelled, says Helmut Geisert, Henselmann’s son-in-law, who lives in one of the still splendid apartments, by the architects popping amphetamines so that they could work through the night. It must have looked completely alien, this wedding cakeish construction, gleaming in the still ruined city.

So the face of the West had been slapped by the Soviet glove. The West had to respond. Its ingenious answer was the Internationale Bauausstellung (International Building Exhibition, known as Interbau) in the Hansa district of West Berlin, then controlled by the British.

Formerly a wealthy, artistic and largely Jewish quarter, this area too had been devastated, but before the city was formally divided, the Tiergarten (a lush city park) had been constructed as a memorial, rather ironically, to the part played by the Soviet Army in the defeat of the Nazis. Thus, it created the perfect canvas on which to paint a picture of Western Modernism at its social and aesthetic best – bringing the bounty of nature into the home despite the use of space-sav-ing apartment buildings.

In Leben in der Stadt von Morgen (Life in the City of Tomorrow by Marian Engel), a documentary made last year, the architect Thomas Michael Krüger says: “The Hansa quarter was a political answer to . . . Stalinallee. They wanted to demonstrate international Modernism in urban development as a counterbalance to the copies of feudal castles in the eastern part, and lots of formerly displaced architects were invited to contribute their constructional statements.”

The list reads like a roll-call of Modernist greats: Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, Alvar Aalto, Arne Jacobsen (he of the famous No 7 chair) and most significantly for Germany, Professor Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, back from the US to work in his own country for the first time since fleeing in 1934.

The exhibition was an immediate success. Some 1.4 million people visited, and those who managed to get one of the homes (to qualify you were preferably a young family already on a waiting list for housing), were ecstatic. Hanna Krebusch, who has lived in one of Jacobsen’s Atrium-bungalows since moving there with her husband and young daughter in 1960, says: “Getting a place in a new building district, and even more so, in one that was built by the cream of international architecture, was an exciting adventure. I could not have dreamt to live here.”

Krebusch is a design evangelist; visiting her bungalow today, all you see is Modernist furniture – Breuer, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, even the remodelled bathroom has taps designed by Jacobsen in the 1960s – all chosen to complement the house. “In 50 years, I have learnt he [Jacobsen] is a genius,” she says. “It’s fantastic!”

By inviting international architects to contribute, the West German authorities were positioning themselves as outward-looking, rather than, as in the Soviet case, presenting an impenetrable front. The idea was that West Germany, at any rate, was ready to be a member of the global democratic community once more after the horrors of Nazism. And it was a dig at the East, where Henselmann’s first, rather more Modernist proposal for Stalinallee had been rejected when the state newspaper declared it “a rejection of the working class”.

Visiting both developments today and talking to the residents, however, you can’t help but be struck by one similarity. Aesthetically speaking, they couldn’t be more different. But the key, according to both sets of residents, is community – albeit in completely different ways. At Stalinallee, explains Geisert, the large windows meant that despite being on the other side of the road, you could see into the flats of your neighbours, shrinking the space and allowing everyone to be near (or, perhaps, spy on) each other. Residents were encouraged to mix in a restaurant and on a dancefloor in one building, and children played in a café and theatre of their own, with tiny seats so that adults couldn’t take it over.

At Interbau, by contrast, the village-like arrangement of buildings, in a style one of the site’s planners Gerhard Jobst described as “people turning to one another in conversation”, was also intended to foster a sense of community. The complex also has a primary school, an art school and a library designed by Werner Düttmann. The Niemeyerhaus even incorporated a long room to serve as a community space, a common idea in Brazil. It has never been used, however, the German way of life being rather less free and communal than the Brazilian.

Seeing these two developments today, what strikes you are not the differences but the similarities. All the flats are privately owned and run by powerful residents’ associations. In the long run, whatever the ideologies, two ways of living have converged.

Cold War Modern, Victorian and Albert Museum, London SW7 (www.vam.ac.uk 020-7942 2000), Sept 25-Jan 11 2008

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