would scarcely have noticed.)
But while Berlin and its Wall were regularly used by Western politicians to make public points about the evils of communism, the fact was that the city’s divided status was actually the result of a sulky but peaceful agreement to disagree between the old allies turned Cold War enemies. Following the confrontations over the blockade and the building of the Wall itself in 1963, this had eventually been codified in 1971 in the ‘Four Power Agreement’, a magnificent piece ofpragmatic diplomatic obfuscation. It miraculously never mentions West Berlin by name – it is referred to only as the ‘relevant area’. This laid down the rules that allowed secure links between the allied districts and West Germany, while at the same time making clear that ‘the relevant area’ was not legally part of West Germany. In theory, as far as the four governments were concerned, Berlin was still an occupied city, even though they all now recognised East Berlin as the de facto capital of East Germany.
Despite – or perhaps because of its bizarre status – West Berlin was a city that buzzed and bustled almost for the sake of it. On its own, with a population of 2.2 million (against East Berlin’s 1.4 million), it was much smaller than old Berlin had been but still larger than any other German city, East or West (Hamburg had 1.7 million inhabitants , Munich 1.3 million). There was a hedonistic ‘live for today for there may be no tomorrow’ atmosphere of existence in an anomalous enclave in the communist sea. West Berlin had created a new heart around what had in any case been the more affluent, consumerist area of the old metropolis, the Kurfürstendamm.
Not that it was all glitz: far from it. There were areas such as Kreuzberg, which had the largest Turkish population of any city in Europe, and in mid-summer felt and smelled like the back streets of Ankara, with doner kebabs roasting, coffee brewing and old men jangling worry beads in doorways. These were the areas closest to the old city centre, by definition now closest to the new city’s Western edge, areas that West Berlin had effectively turned its back on as if coming too close to the Wall and the ravaged heart of the old pre-war city was simply too painful.
Apart from the Turkish immigrants most of the population in these districts were students, or dropped-out students, who looked at the run-down old nineteenth-century tenement blocks near the Wall being left to rot away for lack of investment in a bleak landscape with little obvious future. And occupied them. Occasionally someone would get court orders and send in the police to evict them, but by and large the squatters presented themselves as Instandbesetzer (repair-squatters), and boasted that they were restoring buildings their owners were neglecting in order to write them down against tax.
Although West Berlin was effectively part of West Germany, it was not legally so. Because of that, anyone registered as a student at a West Berlin university was not eligible to be drafted into the West German army, the Bundeswehr , for the otherwise compulsory military service. As a result the city had a huge population of young West Germans in their twenties, diverted from their studies by its glitzy nightlife and hard-line anarchist fringe. If to the rest of the world the West Germany of the Wirtschaftswunder had come to be embodied by the image of a rotund, affluent businessman behind the wheel of a BMW, West Berlin was a long-haired youth in skintight leather trousers living in a squat and smoking dope. It also had a hard-edged techno rock culture, which allied with its scarred, fractured landscape, and traumatised Nazi past meant that West Berlin in the early eighties was the closest equivalent to urban heroin chic. No surprise that David Bowie had fallen in love with the place, moved into an apartment in Schöneberg and recorded ‘Heroes’ as Helden in German, with the Wall as a leitmotif in
But while Berlin and its Wall were regularly used by Western politicians to make public points about the evils of communism, the fact was that the city’s divided status was actually the result of a sulky but peaceful agreement to disagree between the old allies turned Cold War enemies. Following the confrontations over the blockade and the building of the Wall itself in 1963, this had eventually been codified in 1971 in the ‘Four Power Agreement’, a magnificent piece ofpragmatic diplomatic obfuscation. It miraculously never mentions West Berlin by name – it is referred to only as the ‘relevant area’. This laid down the rules that allowed secure links between the allied districts and West Germany, while at the same time making clear that ‘the relevant area’ was not legally part of West Germany. In theory, as far as the four governments were concerned, Berlin was still an occupied city, even though they all now recognised East Berlin as the de facto capital of East Germany.
Despite – or perhaps because of its bizarre status – West Berlin was a city that buzzed and bustled almost for the sake of it. On its own, with a population of 2.2 million (against East Berlin’s 1.4 million), it was much smaller than old Berlin had been but still larger than any other German city, East or West (Hamburg had 1.7 million inhabitants , Munich 1.3 million). There was a hedonistic ‘live for today for there may be no tomorrow’ atmosphere of existence in an anomalous enclave in the communist sea. West Berlin had created a new heart around what had in any case been the more affluent, consumerist area of the old metropolis, the Kurfürstendamm.
Not that it was all glitz: far from it. There were areas such as Kreuzberg, which had the largest Turkish population of any city in Europe, and in mid-summer felt and smelled like the back streets of Ankara, with doner kebabs roasting, coffee brewing and old men jangling worry beads in doorways. These were the areas closest to the old city centre, by definition now closest to the new city’s Western edge, areas that West Berlin had effectively turned its back on as if coming too close to the Wall and the ravaged heart of the old pre-war city was simply too painful.
Apart from the Turkish immigrants most of the population in these districts were students, or dropped-out students, who looked at the run-down old nineteenth-century tenement blocks near the Wall being left to rot away for lack of investment in a bleak landscape with little obvious future. And occupied them. Occasionally someone would get court orders and send in the police to evict them, but by and large the squatters presented themselves as Instandbesetzer (repair-squatters), and boasted that they were restoring buildings their owners were neglecting in order to write them down against tax.
Although West Berlin was effectively part of West Germany, it was not legally so. Because of that, anyone registered as a student at a West Berlin university was not eligible to be drafted into the West German army, the Bundeswehr , for the otherwise compulsory military service. As a result the city had a huge population of young West Germans in their twenties, diverted from their studies by its glitzy nightlife and hard-line anarchist fringe. If to the rest of the world the West Germany of the Wirtschaftswunder had come to be embodied by the image of a rotund, affluent businessman behind the wheel of a BMW, West Berlin was a long-haired youth in skintight leather trousers living in a squat and smoking dope. It also had a hard-edged techno rock culture, which allied with its scarred, fractured landscape, and traumatised Nazi past meant that West Berlin in the early eighties was the closest equivalent to urban heroin chic. No surprise that David Bowie had fallen in love with the place, moved into an apartment in Schöneberg and recorded ‘Heroes’ as Helden in German, with the Wall as a leitmotif in
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