Berlin полностью

If West Berlin was to recover at all, and not, in effect, be a permanent embarrassment to the West, it would need extensive subsidies from Bonn. Given his feelings for Berlin, Adenauer was not likely to be an avid proponent of aid, but he fell under pressure from the Western powers to help. British high commissioner Sir Brian Robertson warned the German government that he would not tolerate “an insufficient engagement of Bonn for Berlin.” In 1950 West Berlin was declared an “emergency area” and granted DM 60 million in assistance. Beginning in 1953, a regular Berlinhilfe (Berlin aid) policy was launched, and two years later various tax breaks and income enhancements were granted to the citizens of the city. Washington earmarked some DM 3,000 million worth of its aid to Germany to West Berlin. Assisted by such measures, West Berliners gradually began to join their countrymen west of the Elbe in prosperity, though their ongoing need for special treatment endowed them with the image of poor cousins living off the largess of their richer relatives.

This was a problem that most East Berliners would have been happy to share. In the first years after Germany’s division East Berlin was not appreciably poorer than the western half of the city, but it had fewer prospects for improvement. Its economy was tightly integrated into that of the new East German state, which in turn was wrapped in the Soviets’ straitjacket of centralized planning. Small firms were consolidated into huge state-run combines that turned inefficiency into an art form. The Russians, moreover, continued to draw extensive reparations from the GDR. While the Soviets, like the West, might hold out a glorious economic future for their part of Germany, they undercut the chances of achieving this by living hard off the land themselves.

The fierce rivalry between the two German states naturally extended to the realm of urban reconstruction, which provided the most obvious forum for displays of material prowess and contrasting political ideals. Being the point on the map where the two systems most sharply collided, Berlin became the focus of ambitious rebuilding programs—East and West. Of course, the process in both cases involved extensive demolition as well as renovation and reconstruction. What the new German regimes decided to raze tells us as much about them as what they built.

The first plan for the reconstruction of Berlin was not yet caught up in the contention between East and West. In 1945, under the auspices of the Magistrat, a committee headed by the well-known architect Hans Scharoun developed an ambitious plan to revamp Berlin according to the most modern urban design principles. In place of the incoherent clutter that had grown up in the Berlin area over the ages, his scheme envisaged a collection of residential/commercial “cells” connected to each other and to outlying industrial complexes by a new network of roads and rail lines. Instead of expanding in concentric rings, which was the old pattern, the new city would follow the course of the Spree River, blending in with the topography and the landscape. Clearly, Scharoun and his colleagues wanted to take advantage of the widespread devastation of Old Berlin to create something completely new. To become reality, however, the plan would have necessitated the total reorganization of Berlin’s infrastructure, much of which had survived the war like the foundation of a burned house. Even if the will for such a task had been there, the resources were not, given the need to balance long-term reconstruction against the short-term requirement of putting roofs over peoples’ heads. Scharoun was fired in 1946, and his scheme remained a utopian dream. Fifty years later, when a change in political circumstances brought new opportunities for a dramatic shift in urban design, Berlin planners would once again discover how difficult it was to uproot an entrenched infrastructure and to translate innovative schemes into reality.