Many things look good on paper that later prove disappointing in practice. This was especially true for the architectural drawings of East German housing developments. When you understand the conditions under which these plans came about, these images tell stories worthy of novels, as a surprisingly captivating and well-attended exhibition in Berlin currently demonstrates.

Take, for example, a group of young architecture graduates from the Technical University of Dresden who gave themselves the technically-sounding name "ZE4." When pronounced, however, it sounds like "Zephyr," alluding to the fresh wind from the West - encoded in the cautious way that was necessary in the East Germany of the late 1960s. The visions this group submitted uninvited to the 1968 competition for Bavarian Square in Leipzig were so spectacularly Western that they actually won the contract. The drawings show an ensemble with residential high-rises that would have been more at home in London or Manhattan at the time.

The sheets that Günter Reiss, the most artistically skilled member of the group, created to visualize their proposal - what today would be called "renderings" - are remarkable not just for the buildings themselves, but for what happens between them. The future life imagined there, the people drawn into these visualizations, are often at least as revealing as the architecture itself, since they convey social ideals. This explains why new residential areas typically feature so many young families with baby carriages.

But Reiss took a crucial step beyond the young family idyll in his ZE4 drawings. On the left, a young woman with a Brigitte Bardot hairstyle walks into the picture; in the center, a dapper young official with a briefcase notices her; and on the right, two ladies are already gossiping about what's developing before their eyes. In another sheet, a young woman and man have already struck up a conversation, further back someone is approaching another woman, and to the side, older people are smoking their pipes in melancholic reminiscence. It's absolutely understandable that the officials in Leipzig were enchanted: their square to be developed promised to look practically like a futuristic DEFA film full of young Marita Böhmes and Ekkehard Schalls.

These are just two of the wonderfully numerous sheets that can be seen this summer at the Tchoban Foundation, Berlin's museum for architectural drawings - and then perhaps never again. "Plans and Dreams - Drawn in the GDR" is one of those exhibitions that makes you wonder why it didn't happen much earlier. But it first required the collaboration of Wolfgang Kil, an excellent expert and sensitive chronicler of East German architectural history, along with Kai Drewes from the Leibniz Institute for Spatial Social Research in Erkner, to bring these treasures from archives and private collections into the public eye.

Perhaps it even needed the problematic image of GDR architecture - "Architecture without Architects," as a West Berlin construction magazine still headlined in 1990. Because here it's now all the more emphatically about the fact that an entire profession couldn't simply be dissolved into anonymous planning collectives, even if practice pushed in that direction. Here, the individuality of people expresses itself directly through the drawing pen on paper.

Part of the exhibition shows the immense drawing skills that were often still taught at universities then, based on existing structures: old building ensembles and city panoramas, often sketched in notebooks during vacation trips. (Like with old master drawings, you can identify distinct schools based on hatching techniques and other conventions.) This was, as the curators write, "the GDR that also existed."

The other, more spectacular part shows instead one "that might have existed."

This creates an alternative architectural history on paper. What a balancing act in a world where, on one hand, nature studies with 6B pencils were still cultivated, and on the other, plan numbers and crane tracks dictated the direction.

Toward the end, you get the impression that many people at their drawing tables at home, with their pencils, reed pens, and brushes, were defending themselves with sarcasm or bitterness against what was happening during the day in their planning offices. Sometimes these caricatures also have something prophetic: Lutz Brandt's "Balcony Dreams," which show a tangle of palms or antenna technology sprouting in front of P2 series prefab buildings, have long been surpassed by reality. The same applies to Gerd Wessel's rotating TV tower sphere as a chain carousel with the inscription "The Express Tour but only for West German Marks": Since payment had to be made in Western currency, the sphere actually rotates twice as fast.

Here you see depictions of GDR city center planning that look as if they belonged to the utopian architectural fantasies of the British group Archigram. And you see pictures that want to tell something about the oppressive nature of "power" through architecture. The suffering, writes Kil, was great among architects. Not a few left the profession and became, for example, art teachers. Others eventually left the country.

The young architects from the "ZE4" group, for instance, had won the competition in Leipzig but still didn't get to implement their high-rise plans. The power shift to Honecker in the early seventies changed the paradigms. Today you see the usual six-story buildings there (where you could save on elevators). Almost everyone from the group then went to West Germany fairly quickly.

Nevertheless, or precisely because of this, the GDR was the country with architects as literary protagonists and leading figures, from Brigitte Reimann's "Franziska Linkerhand" to Stefan Heym's "The Architects," which appeared only post festum. This exhibition now tells these stories once again, as a kind of graphic novel.

The exhibition "Plans and Dreams - Drawn in the GDR" at the Tchoban Foundation in Berlin runs through September 7. Wolfgang Wähnelt's 1986 Magdeburg drawing and Michael Kny's 1981 "Saxon Babel" are among the highlights, showing how architects who remained successful after reunification had already developed their distinctive styles during the GDR period. Herbert Schneider's 1952 Dresden Altmarkt drawing shows what the Dresden Cultural Palace would have looked like if it had been built in the Stalinist style.

The exhibition demonstrates that despite the constraints of the socialist system, individual creativity and artistic vision persisted among East German architects. Their drawings reveal not just alternative architectural possibilities, but also the human stories behind the standardized building programs that came to define the GDR's urban landscape. The catalog costs 29 euros.