Berlin полностью

The next victim of “socialist renewal” was another historic square, the Alexanderplatz, which in the interwar period had been known for its busy S-Bahn station, warren of small shops, bustling marketplace, enterprising crooks, small-time gamblers, and aggressive prostitutes. In place of such bourgeois “decadence,” the GDR planners decided to erect a monument to socialist functionalism. In 1958, when planning for the Communist square began, Hermann Henselmann, architect of the Stalinallee, proposed as its centerpiece a 320-meter mast, to be called the “Tower of Signals.” This idea was rejected as “Western influenced.” However, four years later, after having abandoned an alternative plan to construct a governmental skyscraper, GDR planners revived the tower idea, and in 1969 the 365-meter Television Tower, East Germany’s tallest structure, opened for business. Known locally as “the giant asparagus,” or “Ulbricht’s last erection,” the tower featured a glass-covered spheroid near the top containing a restaurant offering grand views in all directions. The most interesting view, however, was of the tower itself at sunset, when the tinted glass ball cast a reflection in the shape of a giant cross. For years GDR architects tried in vain to eliminate this bothersome symbol, which in the West was interpreted as the triumph of Christianity over Communist atheism.

Beneath the tower the new “Alex” spread out like an urban desert. Looking lonely and forlorn in this vast paved-over expanse stood the medieval Marienkirche, which Ulbricht was dissuaded from tearing down because of international protest. Between 1962 and 1970 a series of ungainly concrete boxes went up along the edges of the square. First came the thirty-nine-story Hotel Stadt Berlin, the largest hostelry in the GDR. Next to appear was the Warenhaus Centrum, the GDR’s largest department store. With its shoddy goods and near-empty shelves, it was hardly a satisfactory replacement for the old Wertheim store that had once served the area. Other new buildings included the House of Electrical Industry, the House of Health, the Central Administration for Statistics, the House of Publishers, the House of Teachers, and the House of Travel. The education and travel buildings boasted socialist-realist friezes which, according to the government, “match the buildings in size and beauty.”

Ich bin ein Berliner

While the Ulbricht regime was seeking simultaneously to quarantine its capital from unsavory influences and to build it up as a showplace of technical progress, the authorities in West Berlin were scrambling to keep their city alive and open to the outside world. At first it seemed that they would get little support in this endeavor from the government in Bonn. Adenauer himself continued to avoid the city. In campaigning for the Bundestag elections in September 1961 he revealed his distaste for Berlin in his attacks against his SPD challenger, Willy Brandt. He charged that Khrushchev had ordered the erection of the Berlin Wall to generate sympathy for West Berlin and to help Brandt win the election. When the new Deutsche Oper opened in West Berlin, five of Adenauer’s cabinet ministers saw fit to skip the premier, an obvious snub of the city.

Quite independent of snubs from Bonn, the presence of the Wall threatened to throw West Berlin into terminal doom. The city’s senator for popular education ordered the cancellation of the Opera Ball in November 1961 on the grounds that it was “inappropriate to hold an officially sponsored dance-gala at a time when our fellow citizens from the East are risking their lives everyday trying to escape to freedom.” Other municipal politicians protested that this policy made no sense. As one senator argued: “Berlin must become . . . the most beautiful, glittering, and modern city in Germany. That goes also for . . . balls.” A reporter proposed sarcastically: “Let’s also forbid all theater, cinema, sports, and popular dances . . . that’s the perfect way to get people to stay in West Berlin.”

Getting people to stay in West Berlin was indeed a concern, for by the summer of 1962 folks were leaving the city at the rate of about 300 per day. Most were young and highly trained, the kind of people who before the Wall had been fleeing the GDR. Another danger, at least in the eyes of the Bonn government, was that the West Berliners who remained in the city might become so embittered by their lot that they would look to the East for relief. The West might then lose Berlin after all—not to direct East German annexation but to creeping “defeatism” and “neutralism.” As an emergency measure to lift West Berliners’ morale, Adenauer asked President Kennedy to pay a personal visit to the beleaguered city.