Early commercial reconstruction, meanwhile, focused on the area around Zoo Station and the Kurfürstendamm, whose revival, it was hoped, would help jump-start the local economy. In 1950 the luxurious KaDeWe department store reopened its doors to hordes of shopping-starved citizens. They stormed the place with such zeal that two clerks were injured while trying, in good Prussian fashion, to keep order. An automobile showroom on the “Ku-Damm” proudly displayed that symbol of West Germany’s emerging Wirstschaftswunder (economic miracle), the Volkswagen Beetle. The most impressive new building on the avenue was the rebuilt Hotel Kempinski, which opened in 1952 on the site of the original hotel, destroyed in 1945. Erected with money from the Marshall Plan, the new hotel was, as the Tagesspiegel wrote, a prime symbol for “the faith that’s being shown in our city.” Such symbols were desperately needed in a town that was already feeling the ill effects of isolation and exclusion from the nexus of political power. Thus the Kempinski was more than just a hotel. It was, in the words of a recent retrospective, “an outpost of glamour in the frightening arena of the Cold War [and] . . . a bridge back to the urbane world of the Twenties, before all the horrors began.” The part of West Berlin in which the Kempinski is located was not yet the world famous mecca of consumerism and glitzy entertainment it would become in the 1960s, when its reigning symbol was a revolving Mercedes star atop a high-rise office building, but for many inhabitants of the city, including those who lived in the East, the Zoo/Kurfürstendamm area was now the one place in town where they could feel truly alive—could feel, that is, like Berliners again.
The East German Workers’ Uprising of June 17, 1953
Worried by the growing attraction of West Berlin, the East German government started taking measures to curtail contacts between the two halves of the city. In early 1952 they cut the telephone links with the West, and a year later they suspended bus and tram service into West Berlin. Now the only public transport between East and West were the U-Bahn and S-Bahn lines. However, the fact that one could still move at all across the ideological divide in Berlin made the city an anomaly in Germany after May 26, 1952, for on that date the GDR government barricaded its border with West Germany. From this point on the inner-German border became one of Cold War Europe’s most menacing frontiers—an 858-mile death-strip of barbed wire fences, control points, watchtowers, mines, and, later, automatic shooting devices. East German citizens living near the border who were considered by their government to be “a risk to the antifascistic, democratic order” were summarily expelled from their homes.
Ulbricht’s efforts to isolate the GDR and East Berlin further undermined an economy already burdened by agricultural collectivization, nationalization of industry, neglect of consumer goods, unrealistic productivity quotas, and the huge costs of building up a quasi army, the Kasernierte Volkspolizei. Living standards for the “toilers” plummeted while taxes and other obligations to the state became more onerous. As a result, more and more East Germans chose to move west, which after May 1952 could be accomplished only through Berlin. In the second half of 1952, 48,831 GDR citizens went west; in the first quarter of 1953, the figure rose to 84,034, including 1,836 members of the SED. A high percentage of the refugees were young and well-educated, the kind of people that no state can afford to lose. One would have thought that this situation called for a relaxation of the government’s efforts to force the economy toward full communism through increased collectivization and higher production quotas, but Ulbricht and Grotewohl believed it necessary to raise the productivity “norms” for industrial and construction workers. Insisting that the most pressing problem of the hour was “to overcome the low work norms,” the government decreed on May 28, 1953, a productivity increase of at least 10 percent in state-run operations.
