To reinforce symbolically their claim to the parts of Berlin that they controlled (eight of the twenty districts that had comprised Greater Berlin), the East Germans renamed a large number of streets and squares according to their own political lights. The old Bülowplatz, which under the Nazis had become Horst-Wessel-Platz, did not regain its original name; rather, it became Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. The Wilhelmstrasse, imperial and Nazi Berlin’s premier political address, became Otto-Grotewohl-Strasse, after the East-SPD leader who helped found the SED. Dorotheenstrasse, a major artery in the East, was rechristened Clara-Zetkin-Strasse. As a symbol of its rejection of German militarism, the GDR rulers expunged the names Hindenburg and Ludendorff from the map of East Berlin, while adding that of Carl von Ossietzky, the editor of the
The authorities in West Berlin, meanwhile, employed the tactic of name-changing to make some political claims of their own. In June 1949 they renamed the Kronprinzenallee “Clayallee” after the American military governor and hero of the Berlin Airlift. To document their ties to the heritage of Social Democracy, they rechristened Augusta-Viktoria-Platz, in Charlottenburg, Breitscheidplatz, after Rudolf Breitscheid, an SPD leader who was murdered in Buchenwald. In an effort to show that they, too, had claims on the revolution of 1918, the West Berliners renamed the Tirpitzufer in the Tiergarten district Reichspietschufer, after Max Reichspietsch, a sailor who had been court-martialed and executed for staging a hunger strike over unjust treatment of the crews in the imperial navy in 1917. (Later, conservatives on West Berlin’s city council attempted to rid the city of this association, just as they tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent the erection of a monument to Rosa Luxemburg on the Landwehr Canal.) Unlike East Berlin, West Berlin retained the names of many German military leaders, including Hindenburg, Moltke, and Roon.
As this battle of place-names suggests, the history of Berlin from 1949 on was shaped to a large degree by the competing claims of the two German states. While continuing to worry about West Berlin as a financial drain, the government of the Federal Republic could not turn its back on the city, for it expected (at least in principle) to return there some day, and it hoped to turn this “outpost of freedom” into a living example of Western superiority. The East German government was equally determined to transform East Berlin, which it always referred to as “Berlin—Capital of the GDR,” into a showcase of Communist progress and power.
In the first years of the Federal Republic, West Berlin was anything but a model of economic vitality. Stranded within the new East German state, cut off from its traditional markets and sources of supply, and with many of its enterprises outmaneuvered by more efficient Western firms, the city struggled to compete. While West Germany embarked on its “economic miracle,” West Berlin suffered a miracle in reverse. In 1950 West Berlin factories, which were working only at 40 percent of capacity, exported DM 997 billion worth of goods to West Germany, while the return trade was worth DM 2,239 billion. In that same year West Berlin registered 31.2 percent unemployment, and a full 40 percent of the population drew public relief. Not until 1954 did unemployment levels dip below 20 percent; it took another two years for them to drop to the level of the preblockade period. West Berlin may have been free, but it was also very poor.
