Another addition to West Berlin’s cultural landscape, the Deutsche Oper, went up in the Bismarckstrasse in Charlottenburg, where the old Municipal Opera had once stood. The new facility, which opened in September 1961 with a performance of
With generous budgets and no pressure to integrate their work into existing neighborhoods, architects in West Berlin produced some stunning structures, but also much that was hideous. The International Congress Center, completed in the mid-1970s at enormous cost to the taxpayer, fell into the latter category. The architects, Ral Schüler and Ursula Schüler-Wittes, came up with a silver-skinned monstrosity that resembled a jumbo lunch box, or a blown-up version of something a troubled child might have built with his Erector Set.
Of course, no one had to live in this building, which was unfortunately not the case with the two new housing projects constructed in the 1960s and 1970s to accommodate the workers brought in from West Germany. The Gropius-Stadt on the southern edge of the city and the Märkisches Viertel in the north looked as if they had been dropped on the Brandenburg plain by helicopter. Although more solidly built than their East German equivalent in Marzahn, they functioned better as statements of architectural hubris than as lodgings for human beings. Visiting one of these complexes in 1963, the British writer Ian Fleming spoke of a system that “treats the human being as a six-foot cube of flesh and breathing-space and fits him with exquisite economy into steel and concrete cells.” Only in the 1980s, when the city spent additional millions to upgrade these structures and to alter their monolithic appearance, did they become more livable.
While some of West Berlin’s new buildings were aesthetically striking, they could not transform the city into a beautiful or harmonious place; on the contrary, they tended to accentuate its ugliness. Yet this in-your-face disharmony was a source of local pride. Many Berliners were pleased that their city had not been tastefully restored, as had so many other West German cities. As the transplanted West Berliner in Peter Schneider’s
I like Berlin, really, for the ways in which it differs from Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich: the leftover ruins in which man-high birches and shrubs have struck root; the bullet holes in the sand-gray, blistered facades; the faded ads, painted on fire walls, which bear witness to cigarette brands and types of schnapps that have long ceased to exist. . . . Berlin traffic lights are smaller, the rooms higher, the elevators older than in West Germany; there are always new cracks in the asphalt, and out of them the past grows luxuriantly.
Some Germans also harbored the conviction that Berlin, the former Nazi capital, had no business being pretty or glamorous. In the 1980s the Munich-based filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta, who shot some of her films in West Berlin, argued that Berlin was the only city in Germany that looked like Germany
The campaign to make West Berlin into a cultural metropolis of international rank involved, in addition to many new buildings, the creation of an array of artistic and intellectual institutes, think tanks, foundations, festivals, exhibitions, and schools. The institutions endowed by Bonn and other benefactors included the Film and Television Academy, the Institute for Educational Research, the Institute for Advanced Study, the International Institute for Music Studies, the Berlin Academy of Art, the Berlin Literary Colloquium, the Berlin Artists’ Program, the Berlin Festival Weeks, and the Berlin Film Festival. Even the Aspen Institute had an outpost in Berlin—on the property where Goebbels’s house had once stood.
The cultural institution that stood out from all the others was the Berlin Philharmonic. The orchestra’s principal conductor was Herbert von Karajan, who succeeded the beloved Furtwängler in 1954 and reigned over the orchestra like a benevolent (and sometimes not so benevolent) dictator for the next thirty years. During this period he raised the ensemble to the pinnacle of the musical world. Although the conductor was pleased to be performing in such a glorious facility as the Neue Philharmonie, he seems to have had little truck with Scharoun’s ideal of an aesthetic sharing between the musicians and their audience. Berliners came to respect von Karajan, but they never loved him the way they had loved Furtwängler. Moreover, as the first jet-set conductor, with posts also in Vienna and Salzburg, Karajan was absent much of the time from Berlin.
