It was not, however, as a would-be world city but as a self-conscious enclave of louche living and neo-Weimar “decadence” that West Berlin exercised its peculiar fascination in the 1970s and 1980s. In a faint echo of the 1920s, the Walled City lured in a small coterie of rebellious foreign artists looking for a life on the margin, on the edge. Punk rockers from Britain and America fetched up in West Berlin because the scene there seemed even grittier and nastier than New York or London, and it had the added frisson of that lovely Wall, the perfect metaphor of dangerous division. Here one could flirt with the ghosts of Goebbels and Hitler and then hop over the border for a little provocative romance with the Commies. “I am waiting for the Communist call,” proclaimed the Sex Pistols’s Johnny Rotten as he strutted about in West Berlin, decked out in black leather and swastika tattoos. Lou Reed came to the city in the early 1970s to find inspiration for his third solo album, Berlin, in which he used images of druggies and derelicts to illustrate his own story of emotional train-wreck. In this record Berlin is a symbol of longing, loss, and stark antinomies, as it was for some of the cabaret artists of the early 1930s. The British punk-crooner David Bowie likewise made the pilgrimage to West Berlin in the 1970s, but in his case he settled in for awhile, consciously emulating Auden and Isherwood. Bowie’s decision to move to Berlin reflected not only his Weimar fixation but a fascination for that ultimate abomination, fascism. He prowled the city in search of Nazi relics, taking particular delight in the ruins of the Gestapo headquarters next to the Wall and in Göring’s former Air Ministry in East Berlin. À la Isherwood, he found dreary digs in a seedy part of town and frequented gay bars like the Nemesis Café, 1970s Berlin’s answer to the Cozy Corner. Accompanied by the American rocker Iggy Pop, who prided himself on being as disgusting off-stage as on, Bowie relentlessly toured the city’s nightclubs, favoring the Roxy and above all the infamous Dschungel (Jungle), where coked-out kids moshed to the throbbing beat of West Berlin’s techno-pop group, Kraftwerk. After their nights on the town the rockers typically took breakfast at Joe’s Beer House on the Kurfüstendamm. Friends of Bowie’s recall him “upchucking in the alley after a gallon of König-Pilsners” and screaming “Go dick yourself” to fans who asked him for an autograph. No doubt Bowie and company would have acted like asses wherever they were at this stage in their lives, but the city of West Berlin, that open-air theater of the grotesque and the forbidden, seems to have brought out the worst in them.
Although Berlin’s chief claim to fame in the Cold War period derived primarily from its brutal division, West Berlin officials downplayed this sad reality in their efforts to market the city to tourists. “Berlin bleibt Berlin” (Berlin remains Berlin) was the word of the day. An opportunity to focus attention on the entire city as a destination of historical and contemporary interest came in 1987 with the observation of the city’s 750th anniversary. Here was a chance to show the world that both parts of the city, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, could work together to celebrate a common heritage. This chance was missed, however, because officials in the East rejected the West’s proposal for a joint commemoration. Instead of cooperation, the anniversary provided yet another occasion on which the two regimes competed for the title of the “true Berlin.”
One of the high points of West Berlin’s commemoration was an exhibition on the history of Berlin since its foundation, which took place in the Martin-Gropius-Bau hard by the Wall. To their credit, the organizers did not neglect the less savory side of Berlin’s history. Considerable attention was paid to the Nazi period and the exodus of Berlin’s Jews, which, as the exhibition catalog correctly noted, “destroyed more [of Berlin’s spirit] than the Allied bombing.” By devoting so much space to Berlin’s place in the Nazi system, the exhibition organizers hoped partially to make up for the city’s tendency in the immediate postwar era to “repress its recent history, wipe out historical traces, and demolish the buildings associated with the perpetrators.”
