In the late 1970s West Berlin’s municipal government finally admitted the obvious—namely, that the Turks were there to stay—and instituted programs designed to integrate them into the fabric of German society. But the initiatives were too little and too late. Older Turks had lived too long in their own ethnic ghetto, while the younger ones—those born and raised in Germany—wanted neither to “become German” (even if this were possible) nor to remain Turkish in the fashion of their fathers. The younger generation evolved a hybrid Turkish-German culture suspended between the city in which they lived and the country of their ancestors. They were not willing to turn themselves inside out just to be “accepted” by the Berliners. As one young Turkish rap musician put it: “We are living in Germany and I like Germany. My father has worked here for thirty years. My message to the Germans is that when you want to you can live with me, when you don’t want to it’s not my problem, it’s your problem.”
For all their justifiable ambivalence about Germany and Berlin, the Turks were well adapted compared to the illegal immigrants from Africa and Asia who started to enter the city in large numbers in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of them arrived through the courtesy of the East German government, which, in exchange for hefty payments of hard currency, flew them to East Berlin and then dumped them over the Wall. West Berlin’s authorities could not prevent this without imposing barriers at the various checkpoints, which would have been tantamount to recognizing the Wall as an international border. But while the illegals were allowed to stay in West Berlin, they were not provided with any of the support systems given to registered asylum seekers and ethnic German Übersiedler (settlers) from Eastern Europe. Left to fend for themselves, these people became foot soldiers for prostitution rings, cigarette smuggling operations, and cheap-labor contractors. Their presence added to West Berlin’s image as a crime-ridden, foreigner-infested Babel.
The Glittering Thing
In 1966, according to a Der Spiegel story entitled “The Glittering Thing,” West Berlin had 2.2 million people, 70,000 dogs, 7,000 beehives, 7,000 eating and drinking establishments, hundreds of zoo animals, and Rudolf Hess (now the lone prisoner in Spandau)—all crammed into an area about the size of Andorra. Just about everything had to be imported from West Germany, 150 kilometers away, including milk, which arrived daily in thirty-seven tanker trucks whose drivers had to navigate a strictly controlled route and pass two inspection stations—surely a milk route from hell. In summertime the beach at Halensee, known locally as the “whore’s aquarium,” boasted “the largest collection of attractive and available women this side of St. Tropez.” But the city also had West Germany’s highest percentage of old folks: 25 percent of the population was over sixty-five, compared to an average of 11.8 percent in the rest of the Federal Republic. Its suicide rate was double that of the other West German states and one-fifth higher than in East Berlin—a function no doubt of the claustrophobic malaise known as Mauerkrankheit (Wall-sickness). Its once-proud football clubs, Hertha BSC and Tasmania 1900, had been dropped from the first federal football league—perhaps another reason for the high number of suicides. Despite all the subsidies, investment in new factories and equipment was 25 percent lower in West Berlin than in the rest of West Germany. On the other hand, the city annually spent 111 marks per capita on its public bureaucracy (compared to 91 marks in Hamburg). Five years after the erection of the Berlin Wall, West Berliners were losing hope that their city might once again serve as “the unified capital of a unified German nation.” Some local officials admitted that the atmosphere had become “sticky,” and one paper dared to ask if Berlin was a Weltstadt at all, or really just an overgrown Provinz. Egon Bahr, the Senate’s press chief, warned that “Berlin must not be allowed to become the largest small city in the world.”
