Berlin полностью

The Russians bid their own farewell to Berlin in a ceremony on August 31, 1994. Historians noted that this was the biggest pullout ever by an army that had not been defeated in battle. Yet of course the pullout did signal a defeat of sorts, despite brave words about lasting friendship and future cooperation from Helmut Kohl and Boris Yeltsin. Spectators at the Soviet good-bye parade were few and far between. In addition to their war memorials, which the Germans promised to maintain, the Russians left behind barracks and other housing units stripped of window frames, toilet fixtures, and electrical outlets. They also left a legacy of environmental devastation in the form of toxic dumps and oil-soaked bases.

The final pullout of the Western Allied troops in September 1994, like the big parade in June, was at once festive and elegiac. Tens of thousands of Berliners turned out for countless good-bye parties, and many a tear was shed for the departure of “our good friends.” To keep alive memories of the Allied presence in Berlin, and to educate future generations about the Western powers’ role in the divided city, German officials established an Allied Museum at a former American base. The opening exhibition, entitled “More Than A Suitcase Remains—the Western Powers in Berlin 1944–1994,” featured various objets of the Cold War era: a chunk of an eavesdropping tunnel dug under East Berlin in the 1950s; one of the Hastings cargo planes that flew in supplies in the airlift; a U.S. tank that had stood barrel to barrel with Russian armor when the Wall went up in 1961; and, pièce de résistance, the guards’ hut from Checkpoint Charlie. There were also artifacts of the “abnormal normality” of everyday Allied life in the divided city: uniforms, street signs, Campbell’s soup cans, candy wrappers.

The choice of a former American base for the Allied Museum was appropriate because the American impact on the town was by far the strongest. No major European city had become more Americanized than West Berlin. In addition to vast housing complexes and training facilities, the physical legacy left behind by the Americans included a golf course, yacht club, several schools, officers clubs, and an array of McDonald’s, Burger Kings, bagel shops, rib joints, diners, and other icons of the American Way of Life. For years Berlin had sponsored an annual Deutsch-Amerikanisches Volksfest, which drew in thousands, and it boasted an American-style football team, the Berlin Eagles. Of course, as we have noted, America’s relationship with Berlin over the past half-century had hardly been tension-free. From the mid-1960s through the 1980s West Berlin had witnessed hundreds of anti-American demonstrations, many of them violent. Even the protests, however, were influenced by America’s own counterculture, which provided the template for these actions. As for the new generation of Berliners coming of age in the 1990s, they saw America less as a savior, or as an oppressor, than as a giant pop-culture factory. A sixteen-year-old boy told an American reporter at the opening of the Allied Museum: “Just about everything we have that’s fun comes from the United States. If it weren’t for Americans, we wouldn’t have baseball caps. We wouldn’t have malls or fast-food shops or skateboards. Life just wouldn’t be as good.” Unlike the Russians, the Americans did not bequeath to Berlin a legacy of disemboweled buildings and polluted soil, but they certainly left behind plenty of junk.

The Guard’s House from Checkpoint Charlie at its new location in the Allied Museum

Shortly before the America-dominated Allied Museum opened in Zehlendorf, a rival “German-Russian Museum” opened across town in Karlshorst, where the Soviet occupation had been based. The museum is located in the villa in which Field Marshal Keitel and Marshal Zhukov signed Germany’s capitulation to the Soviets just before midnight on May 8, 1945. In 1968 the building was converted into the “Museum of the Unconditional Surrender of Fascist Germany in the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945.” The new facility, which opened in May 1995, fifty years after the capitulation, seeks to enshrine “common forms of memory,” though it is doubtful that the Russians and Germans have much in common when it comes to interpretations of the past. Not surprisingly, the Karlshorst collection places considerable emphasis on the Second World War. A prize attraction is Hitler’s campaign-map for the attack against Poland in 1939; a constantly running film clip shows Keitel driving across the destroyed Reich capital to the capitulation ceremony. The Karlshorst museum operates under combined German and Russian supervision, but this joint administration cannot disguise the fact that the institutionalized memory of Berlin’s recent past, like the city itself, remains sharply divided.