Authors: Frederick Taylor
By the 1970s, almost a quarter of all Berliners were over the age of
sixty-five, twice the proportion in West Germany. By contrast, the percentage of children under the age of fifteen was 15 (in West Germany proper, around 23).
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The West German government’s extremely generous subsidies to West Berlin’s infrastructure, plus a lower turnover tax for businesses there, compulsory relocation of production facilities and administrative offices of Federal government departments in West Berlin, and so on, helped keep the walled-in city alive.
West Berlin was nevertheless slowly depopulating. In the early 1960s, its birth rate was among the lowest of any city in the world. Most years, thousands fewer people came to West Berlin than left, a situation that continued until the late 1980s.
Significantly, in the 1960s, the newcomers were not the traditional immigrants looking for work, nor were they ambitious young professionals. West Berlin was not a place to go if you wanted advancement—that happened in thriving centres like Frankfurt (finance), Hamburg (the press), Düsseldorf (advertising and insurance) or Bavaria, where the new electronic industries were beginning to flourish.
No, those coming to Berlin in large enough numbers to make their presence felt were an interesting crowd, despite—or perhaps because—they were not mainstream. Here were people in search of alternative lifestyles, cheap rents, round-the-clock nightlife, and, last but not least, looking to avoid conscription into the West German armed forces, the
Bundeswehr
. Under Allied occupation law, a West Berlin residence card granted immunity to the West German call-up.
The students of 1961 had supported the escape-helper teams. The evil nature of Communism had been an item of faith. However, by the late 1960s, the student body had moved sharply to the left, fed by those escaping the cosy, conservative values of the West German ‘economic miracle’. And with advent of the Vietnam War, the USA no longer symbolised freedom. On the contrary, when contrasted with ‘imperialist’ America, to these new rebels against capitalism East Germany, though stuffy and Stalinist in many of its external forms, didn’t look so bad. Free to come and go in the East as they wished, Western radical tourists liked its lack of commercialism and advertising, the cheap food, the bookshop next to Friedrichstrasse station where you could buy very inexpensive copies of the Marxist classics. What could be so wrong with a state where
you could buy a hardcover copy of Marx’s
Eighteenth Brumaire
for the price of a cup of (terrible) coffee?
While enjoying the pleasures of a free and easy existence in West Berlin, many of the alternative crowd sneered at the existing population, mocking its consumerism, apparent social conservatism and continuing gratitude to the NATO forces who stood between their beleaguered part-city and its absorption into the surrounding ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ State’.
Instead of spending the 1970s continuing to protest against the Wall, the radical activists who flocked to West Berlin spent their considerable free time protesting against imperialism in far-away countries and, closer to home, against the allegedly proto-Fascist nature of the post-war West German state created by Adenauer’s conservatives. It was true that many more moderate observers had also been disappointed by the failure of the Federal Republic to make a really clean break with the past. West Germany kept many of the rigidly hierarchical structures and authoritarian attitudes of earlier eras. Konrad Adenauer may have disliked and despised the Nazis, but he had been a senior Prussian state employee before 1914, and Lord Mayor of Cologne under the last German Kaiser, and he espoused a pious Catholicism that accepted the absolute authority of the Pope.
As could be expected, the West Germany Adenauer and his political supporters created after 1945 was a parliamentary democracy that accepted the rule of law, but it was far from a natural home for radicalism and free thought. Berlin was historically more tolerant than provincial Germany, and this remained the case even though a robust anti-Communism became general in the Western sectors after 1945.
Gay and lesbian life had flourished in Berlin for at least a century, and had enjoyed almost total toleration in the 1920s, slightly but not completely modified by the existence of the so-called ‘paragraph 175’ which forbade homosexuality. In 1929, the last left-liberal coalition of the Weimar Republic actually passed a repeal of paragraph 175, but within months the Right took control, and the repeal was shelved. Three years later, Hitler seized power. The Nazis added ‘paragraph 175a’, which broadened the area of culpability to include activities not even involving mutual physical contact and also allowing castration for male
homosexuals found ‘guilty’ of gay relationships. This resulted in a vast increase in the arrest and imprisonment of gay men, and to the deaths of many thousands in concentration camps.
After 1945, West Germany kept the Nazi ultra-restrictive ‘175a’. East Germany reverted to the old, less absolute, paragraph 175 and was reckoned in the immediate post-war years to be more tolerant, though there were crackdowns on public expression of gay sexuality, especially when East Berlin hosted ‘world youth festivals’ and suchlike. West Berlin, removed from strait-laced religious conservatism, remained in the area of sexuality, as in other matters, an island. Reinforcing the native community, gay men and women flocked there to live as they wished and needed to live, and by and large were able to do so. Both German states decriminalised homosexuality towards the end of the 1960s, but Berlin has remained a vibrant centre of gay culture into the twenty-first century.
So far as broader social and political attitudes were concerned, there had been some ‘denazification’ immediately after the war, but there is no question that in West Germany many who had made sordid, even brutal careers under Hitler seamlessly achieved the transition into the new postwar élite, in industry, the law, the state apparatus and the armed forces. The Allies, keen at first to purge the country of Nazis, quickly realised that to do so with any thoroughness would also purge Germany of the men (and they were overwhelmingly men) who knew how to run the place. And with the Cold War quickly dominating the international horizon, it was more important that the new Germany functioned, and joined the Western side, than that it was politically pure. A lot of investigations against useful men of a certain age and curriculum vitae were not pursued with due process or energy.
This was a point often made in East German propaganda, with some justice. On the other hand, the fact that 80 per cent of doctors in the East German province of Thuringia had been members of the Nazi Party before 1945 did not lead the Communist authorities to sack them all.
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Exceptions were quietly made, and plenty of them. The same applied to other key areas of the administration and the economy. Neither Germany could really afford to start again with a completely clean slate.
The only area where the GDR did carry out an almost total purge was in the judiciary. By the 1950s, the old upper middle-class judges had
been replaced by ‘class-conscious’ jurists, many of proletarian origins, who could be relied on to do the regime’s bidding. The practice of deciding political offenders’ sentences before the trial had been present under the Nazis, but in the GDR it became common practice. Klaus Schulz-Ladegast said that if one looked properly at the notes your
Stasi
interrogator was making, you could see him writing down recommended sentences according to the replies he was getting. His own, he recalls, was halved to four years as a result of adroit handling of one of his most vital interviews.
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But the purists of the radical Left in West Berlin during the late 1960s and the 1970s were not interested in such fine distinctions. They provoked the establishment and, when the establishment lashed out in response-angered by the contempt the radicals showed for the values that West Berlin had made such sacrifices to preserve-they proclaimed it as bad as the Nazis.
In June 1967, the Iranian head of state included West Berlin in his tour of Germany. As an authoritarian ruler and, so far as the Left was concerned, an American stooge, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi was a fit subject for a big demonstration, and the demonstration turned violent. A student protester, Benno Ohnesorge, was shot dead during an encounter with police. Days of riots followed. Thereafter, many on the Left were convinced that in the Federal Republic they faced Hitler’s heirs and therefore any methods were justified to defeat those who held power.
Symbols of America such as the US cultural centre near Zoo station, the so-called
Amerika-Haus
, were subjected to aggressive direct action. In fact, the
Amerika-Haus
remained more or less under siege for the whole period between the late 1960s and the late 1970s.
There were times when West Berlin seemed to teeter on the edge of violent anarchy. Rudi Dutschke, who ten years earlier had refused to join the East German army, was by this time a doctoral student at the FU-and the most prominent of all the student radical leaders. Serious-minded, fearsomely intelligent, a brilliant orator, he inspired equal measures of fear and respect, love and loathing among his fellow Germans. To the Springer press, he was the political devil incarnate—‘Red Rudi’.
On 11 April 1968, Dutschke was riding his bicycle in West Berlin when he encountered 24-year-old Josef Bachmann. Like Dutschke,
Bachmann had come West as a refugee from East Germany, but unlike Dutschke he was an ill-educated drifter. Having caused the student leader to stop, he pulled a gun and shot him in the head. Dutschke was all but given up for dead, but after a hazardous operation lasting many hours, his life was saved.
The result was more days of riots, in which there were assaults on all the symbols of the establishment, including an attempt by a mob to burn down the Springer headquarters, a tower block right by the Wall. The Springer press, especially the tabloid
Bild-Zeitung
, was blamed for whipping up feeling against the radical student leaders.
Bild
had written of ‘intervening’ against the ‘ringleaders’ of the Left. Bachmann was found to be strongly influenced not just by
Bild
, which was read by millions, but also by Nazi fantasies and the reading of much more extreme far-right publications. He committed suicide in jail in 1970.
Dutschke survived, and after many months of physical rehabilitation managed to regain his powers of speech and thought. None the less, although he continued to be active, he never quite resumed his dominant position on the radical Left. He was troubled by terrible headaches and epileptic fits for the rest of his short life. In the autumn of 1979, Dutschke travelled to Berlin from the Danish city of Århus, where he had taken a teaching job at the university, to participate in discussions about the formation of the German Green Party. By the end of the year he was dead. It is thought that he suffered a fit while taking a bath and drowned.
All the same, in the late 1960s and 1970s, West Berlin was a pleasant enough place to live. It had an intimate, piquant flavour, very relaxed and yet slightly dangerous, that you either liked or disliked, and if you liked it you probably loved it. You could avoid being confronted too much by the depressing fact of the Wall if you knew which routes to take. There was a lively party and cultural scene, plenty of interesting people. Little was forbidden, just about everything was tolerated.
The alternative lifestyle types could be seen, if you forgave their showy and sometimes violent excesses, as a kind of noisy, permanent street cabaret. It was in Berlin that several soon-to-be-notorious anarcho-radical figures, including student leaders such as Fritz Teufel and Dieter Kunzelmann, and the precocious Ulrich Enzensberger, younger brother of the famous German writer, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, set up the so-
called ‘Commune One’ (Kommune 1). Here sexualised politics and politicised sex became the order of the day. What most people understand as politics often receded into the background.
As Ulrich Enzensberger put it:
We wanted to begin the revolution with ourselves. We wanted to revolutionise ourselves, the bourgeois individual, we did not want to become apparatchiks, gaga seminar-room Marxists in our wing-backed chairs with professorial bellies, wives, grandchildren and house-slippers, dead men walking, hands-in-pockets strategists, exhausted political cadres—and neither did we want to become dried-up organisation men or party functionaries, spinning the whole time on the eternal carousel of pay talks and discussion groups. The fact that life consists of cycles-biological and historical cycles-brought me, at least, into a state of white heat. Just get off the treadmill! But how? This was the deeper meaning of our motto: ‘What’s Vietnam to me? I have orgasm problems’. We wanted the great, the fantastic ecstasy, we did not want to sacrifice ourselves for something abstract, for a phantom, for literature or the world revolution. More honesty! We didn’t want to hide anything. Our parents had hidden so much…
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Whether the people of Vietnam suffered from orgasm problems is not recorded by Herr Enzensberger or, preliminary enquiries seem to show, anyone else. Eastern Europeans who arrived in West Berlin were bemused by its leftist scene, this exotic political and social hothouse flower. They were appalled by the extent to which such far-left thought could be so widespread and dogmatically expressed, with the real-world results of Marxism-Leninism so painfully and cruelly apparent right on the rebels’ doorstep, in the shape of the Wall.
Milos Foreman, the Czech film director, arrived in West Berlin in 1968, at the height of the Prague Spring (soon to be crushed by Soviet tanks) and joked: ‘When we were trying to take the red flag down, they were trying to put it up!’
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