The presentation outlines main controversies over the conservation of buildings from the socialist period in East Berlin. The much-debated decisions over conservation or demolition of the German Democratic Republic’s built heritage was dominated by the new stakeholders in the reunified Germany and their neo-bourgeois conception of the city as a polity of heterogeneous self-reliant citizens, which was different from the modernist (and socialist) goal of state-provided equity and similar living conditions for the entire population. At the same time the debates also stood in the context of historic conservation principles that particularly since the 1964 Venice Charter have increasingly moved away from the idea of the architectural monument. Examples will include the former parliament Palace of the Republic, which in 2006 was demolished in favour of a yet-to-be-built copy of the old Prussian Royal Palace as well as residential and public buildings from the 1960s and 1970s, which were partly demolished and partly conserved.