Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin 0822963027, 9780822963028

Citation preview

Architecture, Politics, & Identity in Divided Berlin

Culture, Politics, and the Built Environment Dianne Harris, Editor

E mi ly Pugh

Architecture, Politics, & Identity in Divided Berlin

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2014, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pugh, Emily. Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin / Emily Pugh. pages cm. — (Culture, Politics, and the Built Environment) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8229-6302-8 (paperback : acid-free paper) 1. Architecture—Germany—Berlin—History—20th century.  2. Architecture—Political aspects—Germany—Berlin—History— 20th century.  3. Architecture and society—Germany—Berlin—History— 20th century.  4. City planning—Germany—Berlin—History—20th century.  5. Group identity—Germany—Berlin—History—20th century.  6. Germany (West)—Relations—Germany (East)  7. Germany (East)— Relations—Germany (West) 8. Berlin Wall, Berlin, Germany, 1961–1989.  9. Berlin (Germany)—Social conditions—20th century.  10. Berlin (Germany)—Politics and government—1945–1990.  I. Title. na1085.p83 2014 720.943'15509045—dc23

2013049108

For Da r r en

Map of Berlin indicating the city’s administr ative districts as they appeared until 1990. The grey box is the area detailed by the map of centr al berlin. Map by Bill Nelson.

CONT E NTS



Acknowledgments

ix

List of Acronyms

xi

Introduction: Divided Capital, Dividing Capital

1

1. Modern Capital, Divided Capital: Berlin before the Wall

19

2. A Capital without a Country: Shaping West Berlin’s Image in the Early Cold War

62

3. The Unbridled Buildup of Socialism: Defining and Critiquing Heimat-GDR

106

4. The Dreamed-of GDR: Public Space, Private Space, and National Identity in the Honecker Era

155

5. Capital of the Counterculture: West Berlin and the Changing Divides of the Cold War West

200

6. Back to the Center: Restoring West Berlin’s Image and Identity

241

7. Collapsing Borders: Housing, Berlin’s 750th Anniversary, and the End of the GDR 283 Conclusion: Constructing the Capital of the Berlin Republic

329

Appendix: Governing Entities and Nomenclature, 1949–1989 341

Notes

347

Bibliography

411

Index

435

ACKNOWLEDGME NTS

This book would not have been possible without the colleagues, friends, and institutions that supported its creation and completion in myriad ways. I would first like to thank the following institutions that supported travel, research, and the writing of this book: the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Conference Group on Central European History, the German Historical Institute, the Getty Research Institute, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and the IIE Fulbright Program. The book’s publication was supported by a David R. Coffin Publication Grant from the Foundation for Landscape Studies. I would also like to acknowledge those archives that granted me access to their holdings and the individuals at those institutions whose assistance and patience were very much appreciated: Heidemarie Bock and Petra Albrecht at the Baukunst Archiv, Akademie der Künste, in Berlin; Andreas Matschenz and Barbara Schäche at the Landesarchiv in Berlin; the very helpful staff at the Filmarchiv of the Akademie der Künste, the Bundesarchiv in Berlin and Koblenz, the Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv, and the Getty Research Institute. Additional research was completed with the kind assistance of the staff members at the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin, the Paley Center for Media in New York, the US National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, MD, and the National Gallery of Art Library, where Jacqueline Protka in particular was instrumental in arranging access to hard-to-find materials. Special thanks to the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I screened many of the East German films mentioned in the book. Many thanks also go to Peter Kracht, my editor, and Dianne Harris, series editor, who both supported me and offered much-needed encouragement throughout the manuscript’s revision, as well as to the book’s copy editor, Maureen Creamer Bemko. I am also indebted to the anonymous readers whose comments and suggestions helped improve the book manuscript immeasurably.

  ix

In this book’s earlier phases, the research and writing were guided and supported by Kevin Murphy, who served as an indispensable resource, providing astute and thoroughgoing criticism of its content and prose. The project also benefited from the insightful critique of Rosemarie Bletter, Stuart Liebman, and Paul Jaskot. Professor Jaskot deserves special mention, as he mentored me through the early stages of my career in art history at DePaul University and encouraged me in my early interest in German art, architectural, and political history. Also invaluable to the project’s development have been my personal relationships and the many conversations that have served to enrich and develop the ideas behind it. I thank in particular my colleagues Natasha Poor, Rachel Snow, and Carla MacDougall. Very special thanks go to my colleagues at CASVA, especially Joseph Hammond, Alexandra Hoare, and Marden Nichols, who were incredibly generous with their time and attention. Finally, this project could not have been completed without the love, support, and laughter provided by my husband, Darren Coyle. Thank you for helping me see this through!

x  A c kno w led g m ents

ACRONYMS

ADN Allgemeiner Deutsche Nachrichtendienst (East German press service)

BRD Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany; West Germany)



CDU Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (Christian Democratic Union)



CIAM Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (International Congress on Modern Architecture)



CSU Christlich-soziale Union (Christian Social Union)



DBD Demokratische Bauernpartei Deutschlands (German Democratic Farmers’ Party)



DDR Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic; East Germany)



DEFA Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft

DeGeWo Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Förderung des Wohnungsbau (German Society for the Promotion of Housing)

EU European Union FDGB Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (National Workers’ Union)



FDJ Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth)



FDP Freie Demokratische Partei (Free Democratic Party)



FRG Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany)



GDR German Democratic Republic (East Germany)

IBA Internationale Bauausstellung (International Building Exhibition)

ICC International Congress Center



IMs Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter (unofficial associates of the Stasi)



LDPD Liberal-Demokratische Partei Deutschlands (Liberal Democratic Party of Germany)



MfAA Ministerium für Auswärtige Angelegenheiten (Ministry of Foreign Affairs)



MoMA Museum of Modern Art   xi



MZG Mehrzweckgebäude (Mixed-Use Building Collective)



NAP Das Nationales Aufbauprogramm (National Construction Program)



NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization NF Nationale Front des Demokratischen Deutschlands (National Front of Democratic Germany)



NÖS Neue Ökonomische System (New Economic System)



PDS Party of Democratic Socialism (Die Linke Partei; “Left Party”)



SBZ Sowjetische Besatzungszone (Soviet Zone of Occupation)



SED Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party)



SMAD Die Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland (Soviet Military Administration)



SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party)



SPK Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Foundation for Prussian Cultural Heritage)



SS Schutzstaffel, Waffen (Security Staff, Armed) TAC The Architects’ Collaborative TiP Theater im Palast UFA Universum Film-Aktien Gesellschaft UN United Nations



USIA United States Information Agency



VBK Verband Bildender Künstler (Association of Visual Artists)

WBS 70 Wohnungsbauserie-70 (Dwelling Series 70) ZAG/AbK Zentrale Arbeitsgruppe—Architektur und bildende Kunst (Central Working Group on Architecture and Visual Art)

ZfS Zentralverwaltung für Statistik (Administration for Statistics)

x i i  A c ron ym s

Architecture, Politics, & Identity in Divided Berlin

Alexanderplatz

Hansaviertel

S p re e

Straße des 17 Ernst-Reuter-Platz

TV Tower

er Riv

Brandenburg n en Linde Gate Unter d

Juni

Sta lina llee

Palast der Republik Nikolaiviertel

(fro m 196 1 Kar l-Marx-A llee)

Museum Island

T I E R G A RT E N

Zoo Train Station

Potsdamer Platz Culture Forum

m dam rsten Kurfü

Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin

Haus am Checkpoint Charlie

straße Friedrich

Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church

ße Leipziger Stra

SO 36 (KREUZBERG)

Map of Centr al Berlin. Map by Bill Nelson.

“SO 36”

I NTRODUCT ION Divided Capital, Dividing Capital INTRODUCTION On August 13, 1961, in the middle of the night, the East German government closed the border between East and West Berlin, halting people, cars, and trams in their tracks and sealing off the western sectors of the city with barbed wire. The acrimony between the eastern and western Cold War powers had been growing since the end of World War II, yet the intracity border closure had not been foreseen by citizens on either side of the barricade, and it caught western governments in particular by surprise.1 The rulers of East Germany declared that, with the border secured against the “fascist” west, peace had finally been established in their country. In West Berlin, the Tagesspiegel newspaper declared the event to be East German leader “Ulbricht’s demonstration of naked violence” and a “day Berliners would never forget.” 2 Twenty-eight years later, another unforgettable day would transpire. On November 9, 1989, an unplanned and unexpected announcement regarding changes to the travel restrictions imposed on East Germans rendered the border closure irrelevant. The Berlin Wall “fell,” seemingly as suddenly and abruptly as it was erected. Although Germany’s division into East and West and its subsequent reunification is often conceived of in absolute terms, the divisions did not end with the “fall” of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, just as they did not simply appear with the barbed wire on the night of August 13, 1961, or even in 1949, when the GDR (German Democratic Republic; East Germany) and Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) were formally established. In light of the irrelevance of absolutes in terms of division and reunification, the more important issue is how, after Germany had been divided politically and physically, corresponding cultural and social divisions were established between 1961 and 1989. In other words, how were East and West German national identities—identities distinct from and in dialectical opposition to one another—created despite a shared history and cultural heritage? In what ways was Berlin constructed, both literally and figuratively, as an important site for the creation and negotiation of these identities? Specifically, how did East and West Berlin’s dual identities (that

  1

is, the urban image each possessed) function in relation to the national German identity and the dual political identities? Capital cities are always key sites for the formation and representation of national identity. Berlin, however, is unusual in that its designation as capital has been repeatedly questioned. Germany became a nation relatively late in comparison with other European nations. Moreover, individuals in states such as Prussia and Bavaria often identified more closely with regional rather than national identity. As a result, not only was a unified sense of “Germanness” a somewhat dubious concept in the first years of the consolidated country’s existence but Berlin’s importance as a city that represented a pan-German culture and identity was as much a conceit as an accepted reality. This phenomenon in many ways continued into the twentieth century, as the historian Andreas Daum and others have noted.3 As a result, the various regimes that ruled Germany from Berlin could not take its status as a national capital for granted but very deliberately and consciously had to construct the city as a site of national identity. During the period of the city’s division, consciously constructing an identity meant using specific architectural styles and approaches to build quite literally a “democratic” city in the west and a “socialist” one in the east. It also meant constructing Berlin in a figurative sense, making it a symbol of democratic or socialist values and ideals and explicitly defining its role vis-à-vis the rest of East and West Germany as either the capital, in the former case, or the capital-in-waiting, in the latter. This work traces the history of the efforts to construct Berlin in nationalist and political terms and examines how these regimes used the city to construct two divergent notions of German national identity. The examination proceeds via an analysis of key architectural undertakings, such as the State Library in West Berlin (Hans Scharoun and Edgar Wisniewski, 1967– 78) and the Palace of the Republic in East Berlin (Heinz Graffunder et al., 1973–76) and considers these buildings within their architectural as well as social, political, and economic contexts. Materials culled from the German national and Berlin municipal archives, as well as from architects’ papers and contemporary journal and press accounts, reveal how designers, sponsoring regimes, and members of the critical establishment discussed these buildings and other architectural initiatives. The larger context of these buildings reveals the full complexity of the relationship between architecture and national identity in both east and west and provides new perspectives on buildings and individual architects. Examination of organizations like West Germany’s Foundation for Prussian Cultural Heritage and the East German Building Academy reveals the influences of various cultural and architectural institutions in shaping architectural theory and practice. 2 i ntrod uc tion

This work also examines the significance of specific buildings or building types within popular discourses on, for example, housing, identity, and/or the creation of community, which permits an assessment of the degree to which official rhetoric on architecture and/or national identity resonated with populations in divided Berlin and abroad. While there are a number of texts that deal with specific architects or with particular buildings of East and West Berlin in the 1961–89 period, few discuss them in relation to one another.4 Furthermore, histories of East and West German architecture and planning often employ different methodological approaches: while histories of East German architecture tend to examine buildings from the perspective of politics and economics to the near exclusion of stylistic considerations, the reverse is true for histories of architecture in West Germany/West Berlin.5 In general, there have been very few close, comparative analyses of identity formation in the realm of Cold War cultural or architectural production in divided Berlin, despite the fact that a comparative approach is essential in addressing this question. East and West Germany’s shared history and cultural heritage bound the two nations together, as did their roles in the global political struggle of the Cold War. Because of their complex relationship, East and West Germany relied on one another to define themselves, even when official rhetoric attempted to deny or ignore the other’s existence and legitimacy. As a result, one cannot simply treat either East and West Germany or East and West Berlin as autonomous nations or cities that were completely separate and distinct. One reason for both the tendency to discuss East or West Berlin/ Germany and not the other and for the lack of scholarship on the period from 1961 to 1989 may be the Berlin Wall itself. As both a physical structure and a symbol of the Cold War, the wall became so iconic that it dominated the urban imagery of East and West Berlin and, to some degree, East and West Germany. The dominance of this image persists; one can hardly think of Berlin during this period without conjuring an image of the graffiti-covered western face of the westernmost wall. Part of the wall’s importance lies in the fact that it gave physical form to a political and ideological divide that was already conceived of in spatial terms. Built fifteen years after Winston Churchill’s famous speech, the wall was viewed as the manifestation of the “Iron Curtain,” seemingly confirming a division that already existed. It is partly because of its iconic status that the wall itself is thought of as a single and definitive division that remained impenetrable and unchanged throughout its twenty-eight-year existence. In reality, the wall, which was actually two walls, evolved as both a structure and as a symbol throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Not only did the GDR government build, rebuild, and reconfigure the entire introd u c tion  3

system of enclosure and surveillance of which the westernmost wall was just one part, but the wall’s penetrability fluctuated as East-West German political relations changed.6 However, because of the wall’s importance and visibility as a symbol, it is often viewed as both the cause of the EastWest Berlin/Germany divide and the proof of it. Both the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall were political constructions that, once created, were accepted as immutable fact, although they changed in meaning and significance over time. The term “iron curtain,” for example, existed before Winston Churchill used it in his 1947 speech. It evolved from a metaphor that was intended to suggest the protection of the “West” from the “East” (in the way an iron curtain protected a theater audience if fire broke out on the stage) to a metaphor that evoked images of the unbending domination of and within the “East.”7 Moreover, as concepts, the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain not only described the political, social, and cultural realities of Cold War Europe but also in many ways came to dictate the perception of these realities, of “East” versus “West.” As a symbol and instrument of the Cold War divide, the wall spatialized aspects of culture, politics, and society. Even when it was not directly addressed in, for example, politicians’ rhetoric or an architectural critique, it was always an influence on construction and identity in East and West Berlin and Germany. The Berlin Wall played an important role in the construction of East-West Berlin/German identity throughout its existence in large part because of ambiguity regarding the city’s political status and relationship to notions of “Germanness.” Even before 1961, in order to counteract the uncertainty and tensions created by Berlin’s internal divide, the ruling regimes of East and West Berlin attempted to construct more concrete notions of identity. The anxiety created by the border closure further encouraged the construction of separate German identities. At the same time, the very presence of the wall facilitated the construction of these identities in part because, in creating two distinct physical entities, the wall made it easier to create two distinct cultural entities or places. As the cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan notes in his book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, visibility is a key way of establishing a sense of place. Place, he argues, can be made visible when “rivalry or conflict” pits one place against another and also when boundaries delimit physical space, making it more knowable, as well as more visible. In relation to nation-states, Tuan writes, “visible limits to a nation’s sovereignty, such as a row of hills or a stretch of river, support the sense of the nation as a place.” The Berlin Wall made West and East Berlin definitive places in a way they had not been before, completing Berlin’s transformation from a group of occupation zones to two separate cities.8 4 i ntrod uc tion

The wall affected identity construction in Berlin in other ways as well. Although political tensions eased after 1961, the border closure raised the stakes for Berlin in its role as the center of the Cold War. While Berlin had been the symbolic and literal frontier between “East” and “West” since the end of World War II, the wall heightened the city’s symbolic importance by formalizing Berlin’s division and its place at the center of the Cold War. After 1961, it was clear there was to be no compromise on the so-called Berlin Question. Berlin would be divided or it would be wholly western or wholly eastern; the division and conflict as a whole would end only with the victory of either the eastern or the western Cold War powers. Thus, August 13, 1961, marks a change in the way East-West Berlin/German identity was constructed in and with Berlin and to what ends: it is at this point that the divided city truly became a microcosm of the Cold War as a whole. The symbolic importance of the Berlin Wall was such that “the wall” soon came to refer to both a physical structure and a figurative concept. As a result, the Berlin Wall made the city even more important as a staging ground for competing identities, dividing as it did Berlin and the world into “East” and “West,” as well as into socialist/communist versus democratic/capitalist. So definitive was the wall both physically and as a visual symbol that it became difficult to see the Cold War conflict in any terms other than black and white. This dichotomy was by design, as eastern and western powers encouraged a narrative of the Cold War based on a choice: one or the other, not both. This choice was made physical reality in divided Berlin, where there was what amounted to two alternate versions of a single city. Moreover, this notion of “either/or” would affect identity construction in East and West Berlin, as well as the way the built environment was used to construct such identities: “East” and “West” were constructed and represented as the opposite, politically, economically, and aesthetically, of one another. In his book The Ghosts of Berlin, the historian Brian Ladd argues that the wall united Germans even as it divided them and that it also became a way of understanding the German national character, of dividing the population into “good” versus “bad” Germans, as well as camps of “us” versus “them”: “The very existence of the Wall served to displace any anxieties about German identity onto it. It was ‘a zipper,’ observed the East Berlin writer Lutz Rathenow, linking Germans even as it divided them. The separation enforced by the Wall made it easy to explain away any apparent disunity among Germans and to render harmless the whole idea of German identity. This is the point made recently by the West Berlin writer Peter Schneider: ‘it was the Wall alone that preserved the illusion that the Wall was the only thing separating the Germans.’ ” 9 Perhaps from the time of its introd u c tion  5

construction, although certainly in the 1980s, the wall served as the confirmation of a fundamental difference between East and West Germans at the same time that it explained this difference.10 Decades after it was demolished, the wall remains an influence on “East” versus “West” identity construction, evidenced by, for example, the concept of “the wall in the head” (die Mauer im Kopf ), which refers to the continued cultural, political, and even linguistic differences between East and West Germans.11 The continuing mental “presence” of the wall is perhaps no surprise, given the psychological impact of the structure throughout its existence. Instances of so-called “Berlin Wall disease” (die Berliner Mauerkrankheit) began to be documented immediately after its construction, and, throughout the period from 1961 through 1989, the structure was used by psychologists to theorize and explain Germans’ emotional problems and the national psyche.12 For all these reasons, the Berlin Wall’s significance as a symbol and metaphor cannot be understated. Given its unique situation and history, divided Berlin is the exceptional case that may shed light on the larger context of which it was a part. Not only was Berlin’s urban space used to make arguments about national identity within East and West Germany, but the city was a, if not the, primary site of confrontation between the eastern and western powers of the Cold War, led by the United States and the Soviet Union. However, this view does not suggest that what was true in East and West Berlin can be directly transferred to the “East” and “West” as a whole or even to East and West Germany. In fact, it is the points of convergence and divergence that are the focus of this study. Because divided Berlin was the crucible in which these two separate national identities were forged, focusing on the divided city helps to foreground details that are lost when one considers the eastwest Cold War confrontation on a larger scale. In focusing on the specific example of wall-era Berlin, this work features the methodological approach known in the discipline of social history as “microhistory.”13 This approach is useful for studying divided Berlin because it takes into account “normative structures” (such as the state), which dictate individuals’ actions, as well as individuals’ “constant negotiation, manipulation, choices and decisions,” which variously accommodate or subvert the impositions of the normative structures. The smallscale focus of microhistory and its attention to both governing influences and individual agency are useful because both aspects help to counteract overarching and static frameworks that often lead to totalizing interpretations of history. Instead, the model for understanding the world and a person’s behavior in it is based on “action and conflict.” This model takes into account changes over time and within different contexts and also con6 i ntrod uc tion

siders discrepancies between general patterns and the anomalies within these patterns. As the historian Giovanni Levi writes in “On Microhistory,” society is not studied “as an object invested with inherent properties, but as a set of shifting interrelationships existing between constantly adapting configurations.”14 The microhistorical approach therefore allows one to consider not only the interrelations between individuals and the state in East and West Berlin but also the ways in which this relationship was affected by specific political, economic, and social changes of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The result will be a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between the built environment and identity formation in divided Berlin and Germany. In an essay entitled “Everyday History: New Approaches to the History of the Post-War Germanies,” the historian Thomas Lindenberger discusses how the German iteration of microhistory, Alltagsgeschichte (everyday history), is the most appropriate approach for writing histories of East Germany. In the case of the GDR, the “official” policies and ideologies espoused by the government were often rejected by individual East Germans, although they may have paid lip service to such policies or made an outward show of belief in or adherence to official GDR doctrine. Thus, it does not make sense to gauge societal values or historical trends by considering only the GDR government or its leaders. As Lindenberger writes, “[East Germans’] lives, their behavior, their commitments and passivity, are important factors of the historical entity ‘GDR’ . . . both structures of power and domination and social practice and experience have to be studied and debated.”15 Accordingly, individuals within the GDR who were committed to socialist principles and yet critical of the regime—figures such as the author Brigitte Reimann, architect Bruno Flierl, and filmmaker Wolfgang Kohlhaase—are of particular interest. These are artists, writers, and critics who negotiated a complicated relationship with the GDR government that cannot be understood in strict, binary terms. As Kohlhaase would later comment in 1996, “Now, at a time when people tend to see things in black and white, I would like to emphasize that even with a wall around your country you could still think for yourself.”16 In many cases, the ruling party initially embraced these individuals and their work, only to repudiate them later when the artists began to question the regime’s commitment to its own stated ideals. Analyzing how these figures negotiated governmentimposed strictures as they attempted to realize the political ideals that were purportedly the same as those of the regime provides insight into the complex relationships between cultural politics, architectural policy, and the state in the GDR. introd u c tion  7

Lindenberger argues that historians should use the Alltagsgeschichte approach and conceive of the former East Germany as a “regime of borders” (Diktatur der Grenzen), “referring both to the outer geographical boundary protected against transgression by arms, concrete and barbed wire, and to the multitude of invisible boundaries pervading the body social, producing an inner landscape of relatively isolated units at the bottom of society.”17 A similar approach to West Berlin’s history is appropriate, although, to be sure, West Berlin was not ruled by a totalitarian regime. As in East Berlin, official rhetoric was of supreme importance in West Berlin. West Berlin’s physical isolation, its unique political status, and its significance as a symbol of the western world made it important as a showcase city. The display of solidarity and economic success within West Berlin was critical for western governments’ success in the Cold War struggle. However, in West Berlin, as in the GDR, officials often wrestled with the tension between the city’s image and its actual circumstances. For example, West Berlin could be described as the “capital of the free world” and a “shop window” or “show window” of the West (Schaufenster des Westens), although it never had a truly independent economy and was heavily subsidized by West Germany.18 As with the GDR, a consideration of power structures alone does not result in a complete picture of life in West Berlin during the period of its division. The use in this work of a microhistorical, “everyday” approach to the history and architecture of East and West Berlin should mitigate the influence of myths born of the Cold War, as well as critique them. The scope of this work is limited to Berlin to avoid general and totalizing assessments of either East or West German architecture. Instead, the focus is on the immaterial borders between East and West Berlin and Germany in relation to where they are drawn, by whom, and to what ends. One key way in which the differences and similarities between east and west were alternately constructed and elided was through discourses around architectural modernism. Scholars have interrogated the role of modernism within the Cold War struggle, particularly regarding modern-type consumer products. For example, in Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design, the architectural historian Greg Castillo considers how the design of domestic products became a means of communicating ideas about political and economic values in divided Berlin and Germany in cultural expositions of the 1950s.19 The current study extends such work by considering the official endorsement or repudiation of modernism by government authorities in relation to a larger discourse on modernism that took place in professional and popular spheres, in both the east and west, and over time, from the 1960s through 8 i ntrod uc tion

the 1980s. As such, modernism in this book is revealed as both an instrument and a product of the Cold War, shaped by the forces that deployed it. Modernism is furthermore regarded as an ongoing and shifting discourse, rather than a style or approach that can be defined singularly or absolutely. Sarah Williams Goldhagen discusses this understanding of modernism in her 2005 essay “Something to Talk About: Modernism, Discourse, Style,” when she asks, “What if we conceptualize modernism not as the result of a discourse but as itself that discourse?” She continues: “In this view, modernist buildings, projects, urban plans—including their stylistic positions—as well as manifestos, exhibitions, and other contributions, have been proposals or hypothetical positions offered up, either actually or hypothetically, to an identifiable community of recipients . . . with the intent of testing that proposal’s merit and validity. . . . the primary media through which these debates have been conducted were designs in two and three dimensions; secondary media were exhibitions, conferences, criticism, journals and books.”20 At the root of the debate, as Goldhagen explains, is the question of how architecture might best be used to order and advance society, for either a “more humanized present” or a “future in a better world.”21 This is why modernism was such a crucial weapon in the Cold War, which was often presented as a conflict between two ways of life. A crucial aspect of these “ways of life,” and another realm of discourse within which borders were drawn, was domesticity, the home, and Heimat. The word Heimat is often translated simply as “homeland,” but in German usage the word carries connotations that go beyond this English translation, encompassing various ideas that are in some ways contradictory and inconsistent. For example, it can refer not only to the attachment one feels toward one’s birthplace but also to the feeling of kinship one shares with compatriots, thus connecting to individual and collective identities. It includes both physically locate-able spaces such as a particular nation or a region within a nation, as well as more abstract notions of place, such as “the homeland” or “the place of origin.” Heimat is usually envisioned in historical terms but is at the same time immune to specific political and social developments and associated with values that are fundamental and constant; it refers to a generalized “past” yet is also timeless. The term emerged as a significant concept in the nineteenth century in Germany and was particularly useful in a country where strong regional identities often competed with the notion of a single, national identity that was much more ambiguous. In the postwar period as well, the ability of the Heimat concept to express unity as well as diversity, to exclude as well as include, was useful in reconstructing national identity along the east-west fault line. It allowed Germans to redraw cultural borders in the wake of geographic, introd u c tion   9

political, and economic reconfiguration, offering, as the historian Celia Applegate argues, “the possibility of a community in the face of fragmentation and alienation.”22 Throughout the Cold War, ideas about and images of home, belonging, and national identity were often presented by the regimes of east and west via architecture, urban planning, and design. For example, with the construction of new housing during the Cold War, authorities sought to prove they could provide for the citizens in their sphere. Using “representational” architecture, such as model homes or cityscapes shown in propaganda films, authorities offered images of the prosperous present they had created and of the progressive future promised to those who lived under their leadership. Residents in West Berlin, West Germany, and East Germany often measured the success or failure of their governments by the extent to which they lived up to the standards established by the representational media and official rhetoric around architecture and building. Governments, in turn, measured their own success in part by the numbers of “hearts and minds” won over to their way of life. Because victory in the Cold War was tied closely to public perception, contemporary popular discourses about housing and architectural design are critical to gaining an understanding of how these concepts influenced political and national identity formation in both spheres of the Cold War. As the historian Walter Hixson argues in The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy, “Although deeply embedded in national consciousness, the Cold War is nonetheless a cultural construction devoid of ontological status. Simply put, the Cold War always was and still is a narrative discourse, not a reality. While the Berlin Wall, nuclear weapons, and the deaths of millions of people were all too real, to be sure, the way in which these phenomena are framed and interpreted can only be determined by representation.”23 Accordingly, this book considers the various ways in which these concepts, and the Cold War itself, were represented in, for example, exhibitions, conferences and publications, and mass-media outlets. The specific types of media examined in this study include press reports on divided Berlin, such as those published in magazines and newspapers and featured in newsreels. Both popular and propagandistic films and television programs are also considered. Of particular interest is how the conventions of the Cold War narrative were formed through the repetition of specific themes and images, resulting in a system of representation that was familiar and legible to the broader public, regardless of individuals’ views about the global struggle. The focus on two-dimensional representation, as opposed to exhibitions, is partly a function of the temporal scope of this study. Before 1961, 1 0 i ntrod uc tion

as Castillo and others have demonstrated, exhibitions were a central site of the cultural battles of the Cold War.24 After the closing of the border between East and West Germany and, indeed, between the eastern and western spheres of the Cold War as a whole, the direct confrontation of east and west in exhibit halls was far less common. Although cultural exhibitions continued, eastern visitors could not attend western fairs easily, if they could at all, nor did westerners have ready access to fairs in the east. This shift had already begun before the construction of the wall; in 1957, officials with the United States Information Agency (USIA) lamented the “consistent . . . slow decline” of East German attendance at the German Industrial Fair.25 Castillo calls the Kitchen Debate in 1959 a “parting volley rather than [an] opening shot” in the Cold War campaign of domestic exhibitions.26 This transition took place in West Germany as well. As the historian Jeff R. Schutts has noted, by the late 1950s “advertising had replaced the trade fair as the primary medium through which Germans could spin out their fantasies of convenience and luxury.”27 As a result of this trend, literal image took on increased importance in cultural propaganda initiatives, alongside “image” in a more general sense. In addition, the nature of the Cold War, based on surveillance and espionage rather than overt military action, resulted in a profusion of image technologies, such as spy cameras and multiscreen “situation rooms,” and the same period saw a dramatic rise in domestic consumption of mass media.28 Television became increasingly popular and common in the capitalist world in the 1950s and 1960s, and, by 1960, almost 90 percent of US households contained a TV set.29 Magazines also grew in number and readership during this period, fueled in part by the postwar boom in consumer goods, which were advertised therein.30 Not only spy cameras but also television, magazines, and advertising images were thus crucial weapons in the Cold War, becoming the primary means through which political arguments were transmitted to the public and influencing how individuals understood and interpreted the messages being communicated. This trend grew more pronounced after 1961, when Cold War propaganda became relegated more and more to the realm of mass media and visual culture. From this period, film and television screens, along with the pages of mass media publications, became the principal sites of Cold War cultural skirmishes, more or less replacing the exhibition hall in this regard. In Western Europe and the United States, representations of West Berlin (and divided Berlin) on television and in magazines provide scholars with insight not only into how the city was framed by political and cultural authorities but also into popular discourse around the city and the values with which it was associated. In the GDR, the mass media were tightly introd u c tion   1 1

controlled by the government and as such are not very revealing of popular opinion or the public’s imagination. Articles such as those published in the ruling party’s newspaper, Neues Deutschland, do, however, give clear insight into how the regime intended particular buildings or urban spaces to be perceived. In addition, at specific times and in specific publications, critical voices did find a way to be heard. For example, from 1962 to 1964, the architect Bruno Flierl served as editor of the East German Building Academy journal Deutsche Architektur and was able to publish incisive and critical articles on the question of housing in East Germany until the party stripped him of his post. This study also draws insights into daily life and popular images of East Berlin from histories that include details about everyday life in the GDR, such as The Ideal World of Dictatorship (1999) by the historian and former GDR citizen Stefan Wolle.31 Such books help explain the relationship between lived experience and party rhetoric in the GDR. In addition to press accounts, cinematic films are a particularly revealing representative medium for explaining the literal and figurative construction of divided Berlin. From the medium’s invention, film played a central role in the representation of the urban built environment and, more specifically, in both communicating and helping to shape perceptions of urban identity. In the early twentieth century, for example, the genre of “city films” capitalized on the potential of the film medium to convey to audiences the subjective experience of urban space, with films like Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Big City (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) serving as prime examples.32 As the film scholar Miriam Hansen has argued, “The cinema was not only part and symptom of modernity’s experience and perception of crisis and upheaval; it was also, most importantly, the single most inclusive cultural horizon in which the traumatic effects of modernity were reflected, rejected or disavowed, transmuted or negotiated.”33 The cinema’s unique relationship to notions of modernity is particularly relevant to a study of Berlin, because the city was, as we will see, itself linked with notions of modernity and “modern urbanity.” Certainly in recent scholarship, much has been made of the connections between architecture and film as media, for example, in the way film can foreground the experience of moving through physical space and thus the use of a building.34 The architectural historian Beatriz Colomina argues in her book Privacy and Publicity that “to think about modern architecture must be to pass back and forth between the question of space and the question of representation.”35 By employing specific formal means, such as point-of-view and tracking shots, a filmmaker can direct spectators’ attention to the aesthetic and experiential aspects of a particular building 1 2 i ntrod uc tion

and create empathy between the spectator and the film’s characters.36 Furthermore, examining what narratives and imagery filmmakers associated with what spaces allows one to gauge the effectiveness of Cold War efforts to politicize the domestic spaces of East and West Germans. For example, analysis of “Heimat films,” produced in both Germanys in the 1950s, provides insight into how visions of East versus West German Heimat resonated with audiences in these countries. Another reason film is crucial to this study is that it was afforded a particular significance in relation to national identity in both East and West Germany. In East Germany, the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, or the Socialist Unity Party) generally considered the media to be the “sharpest weapons of the party,” and film in particular was, following Lenin’s dictum, considered “the most important of all the arts.”37 Film was deemed politically important in East Germany, but, at the same time, film studios in east and west sought to attract audiences into theaters. As a result, films were at once a popular medium and controlled and produced by the state and, as such, were required to satisfy the needs of both the party and the populace. As the film critic Joshua Feinstein has argued, East German films provided “an avenue of social communication” and “served a mediating function between the sphere of officially tolerated personal and cultural expression and impulses emanating from a society that, despite conformist pressure, remained essentially diverse.”38 East German films thus provide a means of understanding relationships between the state and popular discourse. According to Wolfgang Kohlhaase, by banning films, the SED could “[express] concerns they did not dare tackle directly.” He explained further that “this had the effect of bestowing a greater importance on art. The lack of public discussion which increased over the years led the public to seek questions and answers in films and books or in the theater.”39 Films were an “avenue for social communication” in the west as well, though to a lesser extent. In West Germany (and West Berlin), a subvention system played a central role in film production from the late 1960s through the 1970s, and although the West German government did not censor individual works, film production was not entirely independent from politics.40 The government’s support of film was no doubt related to the medium’s significance in crafting a positive image of the country for international consumption. During the 1970s and 1980s, the New German Cinema in particular became for the government a “crucial artistic medium for the manifestation of national identity.”41 Regardless, in both east and west, official rhetoric, individual filmmakers’ visions, and popular reception were not always in concert. As a result, films produced from the 1960s through the 1980s provide insight into the values endorsed by the state, the values introd u c tion  1 3

that resonated with the population as a whole, and the points of contention and convergence between these sets of values. In examining the material reality of Cold War Berlin in relation to its representation, this book regards the divided city as a cultural landscape. As the landscape historian Paul Groth writes in the introductory essay to the anthology Understanding Ordinary Landscapes, “Cultural landscape studies focus most on the history of how people have used everyday space— buildings, rooms, streets, fields or yards—to establish their identity, articulate their social relations, and derive cultural meaning.”42 Landscape is a useful word because it encompasses both the physicality and specificity of, in this case, the built environment of divided Berlin and the economic, political, and social processes that produced East and West Berlin. Landscape refers also to a mode of representation, a means through which individuals interpret, and influence others’ interpretations of, a particular milieu. In a 2004 address on the “spatial turn” in history, the cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove used the German word Landschaft (literally, “landscape”) as means of understanding space as a social construct, stating, “[Landschaft] points to a particular spatiality in which a geographical area and its material appearance are constituted through social practice.” 43 Landscape as well as cityscape (Stadtbild) circumscribe both the physicality of a particular site and the more intangible processes that produce them; both aspects of space—the literal and the contextual—come together in representation. For example, Gerhard Klein and Wolfgang Kohlhaase’s 1957 film Berlin: Schönhauser Corner depicts actual street corners in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood but also thematizes the political and economic forces that shaped East Berlin and constituted its identity as a space and place. It is worth taking a moment to define the related and complex terms space and place. Place is a somewhat contested notion, having no single definition despite the prevalence of its use. In her book The Power of Place, the architectural historian Dolores Hayden refers to place as “one of the trickiest words in the English language, a suitcase so overfilled one can never shut the lid.”44 For the cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, place is defined by experience, which he defines as “the various modes through which a person knows and constructs reality.”45 The home, for example, is a place in that it conjures specific associations, feelings, and thoughts; it can also function as a means to define personal identity and national identity in the sense of “homeland.” Place is, as Tuan argues, a “pause in movement” that allows for such associations to coalesce around a particular site. The definition of space overlaps with that of place. As the political geographer Edward Soja has argued, “Space may be primordially given, but the organization, use and meaning of space is a product of social translation, transformation 1 4 i ntrod uc tion

and experience.”46 The understanding of space, specifically urban space, employed in this book is informed by these conceptualizations of it and is thus regarded as contingent and contextual, to be examined, following Cosgrove, with means that are “epistemological rather than ontological” in nature.47 The concepts of space and place, as defined here, help reveal how Berlin was constructed, both physically and figuratively, throughout the Cold War and thus how it functioned as a locus of identity. In the field of environmental psychology, the relationship between place and identity is studied within the subfield of place-identity. The term place-identity refers first to the way place influences an individual’s self-concept or identity. For example, places can create a sense of either belonging or alienation and can become a means of defining self or differentiating oneself from others, of defining home or homeland. But places themselves can be said to have “identities” that are both reflections of the values of the groups that live there and an influence on the formation of their self-identities. The political geographer John Agnew, for example, describes how shared meanings and values “can be projected onto [a] region or a ‘nation’ and give rise to regionalism or nationalism,” thus assigning a national identity to a particular place or set of places.48 The city, particularly the capital city, is a primary example of this projection and suggests a subset of place-identity: urban identity. As with the more general term, urban identity relates both to the influence of urban life on individuals’ identity or self-concept and to the way in which the city as a whole is defined.49 Berlin, for example, was in the early twentieth century widely regarded as a center of “modernity,” a notion propagated through, for example, popular media. Whether or not individual Berliners or Germans agreed with this assessment, it was a well-known trope and a way of understanding Berlin’s cultural significance. As Nancy Stieber argues in her essay “Microhistory of the Modern City: Urban Space, Its Use and Representation,” visual representations are in fact what defines a city, and “the ‘city’ as such exists only as representation since the material artifacts and functional acts that constitute any city are in constant flux and the city as a whole can be encompassed only by the representational terminologies of the spatial and visual disciplines.”50 Furthermore, the city in its concentration of people, architecture, and capital is a locus of social discourse and is thus, as Stieber points out, “a place of making meaning.”51 Architecture and the urban environment as a whole, and as cultural landscapes, not only represent and reflect these meanings but also help to shape shared meanings and transform social values. Finally, it should be noted that the goal of this study is not so much to introd u c tion  1 5

evaluate the veracity of specific representations of Berlin and its built environment as it is to consider how and to what ends they were constructed. Thus, the study addresses the point of view of these images’ contemporary viewers, who for the most part would have had no objective way of gauging the truthfulness of, for example, their own governments’ propaganda. Instead, these audiences judged films’ legitimacy based on other factors, such as the extent to which representations matched their lived experience. It is therefore of primary interest to ascertain why and in what instances particular films or propaganda programs were regarded as credible versus mendacious, how notions of “reality” or “realism” (and thus truth) were pictorially and narratively defined, and how viewers reacted to what they saw on the screen. As Denis Cosgrove states in writing about “landscape images” in general, “Interrogating such landscape images for the ‘accuracy’ and authenticity of their geographical descriptions is to ignore the most interesting questions about landscape today: how it gathers together nature, culture and imagination within a spatial manifold, reentering the material world as an active agent in its continuous reshaping.”52 Accordingly, this book examines buildings, urban spaces, and their representations in order to reveal divided Berlin as part of a shifting cultural landscape that encompasses both the built environment and the public’s imagining thereof. Chapters in the book are organized chronologically so that political, economic, and social developments can be considered in relation to the development of the built environment and its representation. Chapter 1, “Modern Capital, Divided Capital,” provides a summary of the city’s architectural and urban development before 1961, focusing on the major projects of the immediate post–World War II period. In particular, it explains how the rebuilding projects of the 1950s, the Stalinallee development in East Berlin and the International Building Exhibition (Interbau) in West Berlin, set a precedent for how architecture was used in each sphere to make political arguments that were then transmitted to audiences in the Berlins and abroad. Chapter 2, “A Capital without a Country,” focuses on representations of West Berlin around the time of the Berlin Crisis, 1958 to 1961, as well as the early stages of the Cultural Forum and State Library project in West Berlin. The chapter examines how the literal and figurative construction of West Berlin was influenced by the events leading up to, and circumstances following, the construction of the Berlin Wall. Of particular interest is political and cultural authorities’ use of West Berlin’s built environment not only to frame it as a whole and complete city but also to tie it with the Federal Republic, an entity with which it could not officially be tied but on which it depended for its survival. When the Cultural Forum and State Library project began in the early 1 6 i ntrod uc tion

1960s after the wall’s construction, the Federal Republic was still enjoying the fruits of its Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle). In contrast, the East German economy, having only slowly recovered after World War II, was still faltering, and the country itself was largely ignored by the global community. The third chapter, “The Unbridled Buildup of Socialism,” considers the attempts by the GDR government to bolster morale within the country through the construction of housing and to improve its image on the international stage through construction projects in central Berlin. The regime’s efforts are considered in relation to East German architects’ critiques of industrialized building and individual East Germans’ attempts to construct a unique and beloved sense of homeland, or Heimat-GDR, despite continuing uncertainty. The ascension of Erich Honecker to head East Germany’s government in 1971 and the subsequent period of economic growth and optimism are the subject of chapter 4, “The Dreamed-of GDR.” In particular, this chapter analyzes the design and construction of the Palace of the Republic, as well as the development of an “unofficial” homeland or Heimat among East Germans that thrived outside the realms of official and state-sponsored and state-endorsed culture. This chapter examines the role of the palace in the formation of notions of Heimat—private and public, official and unofficial—and considers the growing significance of the home and domestic space as a cultural symbol. Chapters 5 and 6, “Capital of the Counterculture” and “Back to the Center,” return to West Berlin and cover the turbulent changes that took place in the city from the late 1960s through 1980s. Throughout this period, West Berlin became an important site of antigovernment critique emanating from a growing counterculture, and the city’s built environment played a central role therein. The city was, for example, the site of a squatter movement that was larger, more militant, and longer lasting than in West German cities. The representation of West Berlin’s crumbling infrastructure, its protest culture, and its population of Turkish immigrants created, particularly in the West German media, the impression of a “dying” city. In the late 1980s, efforts to “reclaim” the city and refurbish its “cityscape” were undertaken as part of the International Building Exhibition, the formal celebration of which coincided with Berlin’s 750th anniversary. The events associated with both the exhibition and the 750th jubilee, detailed in chapter 6, helped to recenter West Berlin politically, economically, and culturally and decisively influenced the development of the city after 1990. The final chapter, “Collapsing Borders,” considers the role of architectural preservation, housing construction, and the GDR’s celebration of Berlin’s 750th anniversary in the decline and downfall of the socialist introd u c tion   1 7

regime and, ultimately, of the country itself. Of particular interest is the failure of the ruling party’s attempts to use the built environment generally, and East Berlin specifically, to establish its authority and to bolster the morale of its citizens. However, not only did prefabricated housing settlements and prestige projects in East Berlin, such as the reconstructed Nikolai quarter, fail to convince East Germans of the competency of their government, but the city’s urban landscape became both an instrument of resistance and a theater in which to stage dissent and, eventually, revolt. It has become crucial to examine critically the Cold War and the myths it engendered, since such myths continue to have a powerful influence on, for example, US political discourse and notions of national identity in Germany and elsewhere. Cries of “socialism,” for example, have been used more recently to impugn Democrats in the United States, which is decried as “U.S.S.A.”53 Cold War narratives that cast the United States as a victorious and “freedom-loving” nation have played a role in, for example, US foreign policy in Iraq.54 As the historian William Appleman Williams has argued, “The Cold War needs to be viewed as a confrontation that occurs throughout our history.” In particular it is because the struggle was framed as a struggle of absolutes—good and evil, love and hate, right and wrong— that it continues in many ways to define the United States’ self-conception and foreign policy.55 The Berlin Wall maintained and symbolized these binaries, and yet they remain although the wall is gone. Indeed, it is clear that, although the Berlin Wall no longer constitutes a physical divide, the innumerable divisions it engendered cannot be as swiftly or completely collapsed as the wall itself was. A detailed investigation of this period is critical to understanding the continuing influence of these divides, as well as Berlin’s post-1990 development as the capital of a united Germany. The architectural discourses and construction projects that took place after unification are, at least in part, attempts to create a single city, physically as well as ideologically and symbolically, from what had for thirty years been in effect two cities. Furthermore, because contemporary debates about urban planning and construction have often been framed within the context of “restoring” a pre-wall Berlin, it has become important to examine the roots of this notion and how it may have evolved during the period of the city’s division.

18  i ntrod uc tion

O N E  MODERN CAP I TAL , D IVI DE D CAP I TAL Berlin before the Wall The myriad divisions established in Germany throughout the postwar years, from political to cultural to economic, followed to a large extent the fault lines of existing fissures within the country. Many of these divisions centered on Berlin, which, by the twentieth century, had gained a reputation as a city of extremes. It was famously populated with members of the Junker class of politically and socially conservative Prussian landowners, yet its Red City Hall (Rotes Rathaus) was so named both for the color of its bricks and the radical politics practiced within. It was well known as a center of both impressive wealth and technological innovation, as well as incredible poverty and miserable housing conditions. However, although viewed as an extreme case, Berlin was not so unlike other cities in Germany. Nonetheless, the city’s precipitous rise from provincial town to capital of the powerful Prussian Empire and then, from 1871, of a unified Germany helped make Berlin a lightning rod for the country’s fiercest debates about architecture, politics, urbanism, and “modernity.” Ultimately, Berlin became a symbol both of these debates and of “modernity” itself, complicating its relationship to the already ambiguous notion of pan-German identity it was supposed to represent. In the 1920s and 1930s, as the instability of the Weimar period fueled the growth of parties of the far left and far right, opinions about Berlin became even more sharply divided and politicized. For some, the city’s association with leftist politics, industrial growth, and cultural experimentation was inspiring and invigorating. Others viewed Berlin with contempt and considered it a site and symbol of the decay of German culture. These aspects of Berlin’s pre–World War II history would have a particular influence on planning and architecture in the city after 1945. Postwar architects created plans for the city in response to specific architectural precedents, especially the building type known as the “rental barrack” (Mietskaserne), which proliferated in Berlin from the 1860s to the 1910s, as well as the projects produced in the 1920s under Chief City Planner Martin Wagner and in the 1930s and 1940s under Adolf Hitler. The roots of Cold War architecture and urban

  19

planning in Berlin can therefore be traced to the city’s rapid growth from the nineteenth century, the establishment of its reputation as a center of the cultural and political avant-garde, and the architecture associated with both developments.

Capital of Modernity

Although for most of its history Berlin was a relatively unimportant regional capital, its development from the 1840s is characterized by incredibly rapid economic and physical growth, as well as its increasing political and cultural significance for Germany as a whole. As capital of the region, Berlin rose along with Prussia in the nineteenth century, benefiting from the Prussian Empire’s growing political dominance. After the German nation was declared in 1871, the political importance of Berlin was solidified, and the pace of the city’s economic and cultural development quickened. As the city’s economy grew, so did its population. In 1871, the city’s central district and outlying communities were home to 932,000. Only twenty-seven years later, the city’s inhabitants numbered 2.7 million; that figure had risen to 3.8 million by 1919.1 The city grew physically during this period as well, and surrounding districts were gradually incorporated until Greater Berlin was officially designated in 1920. The creation of Greater Berlin made it the third largest city in the world, raising Berlin’s total land area from 22.8 to 340 square miles and the total population to 4 million.2 Even before Berlin’s expansion, it was apparent that the municipal government needed to upgrade the city’s infrastructure and draft new maps and land surveys. In 1861, James Hobrecht, a young engineer who had only recently completed his studies, was chosen to draw up this plan. Influenced in part by Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s work in Paris, the Hobrecht Plan, completed in 1862, featured extremely broad boulevards interspersed with squares and laid out on a grid comprising very large blocks of forty-three hundred square feet. These large blocks were to have been subdivided into a smaller grid of streets, but the speculators who rushed to buy these plots were more interested in reaping profits than in adhering to Hobrecht’s plan.3 In the absence of any real city building regulations, the blocks were densely built up with the Mietskasernen, or “rental barracks,” for which Berlin would become infamous (fig. 1.1).4 Several Mietskasernen, comprising large multistory apartment blocks arranged around comparatively small interior courtyards (Höfe), occupied one block. More prestigious accommodation was located in front sections of the Mietskaserne nearest the street, while less desirable apartments were located toward the interior of the block, accessible only by walking through the linked courtyards. 20   M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

Fig. 1.1. View of Mietsk asernen in the Neukölln district of Berlin, 1919. Photo: bpk, Berlin / Luftbild Berlin GmbH / Art Resource, New York.

From the 1870s to the 1890s, as large numbers of people moved to Berlin to work in its factories, Mietskasernen became hopelessly overcrowded. In the winter, sickness and death were rampant, as many of the apartments did not have heating of any kind.5 Because of the dire conditions in these Mietskasernen, Berlin was often cited as having the worst housing in what was a nationwide crisis.6 Mietskasernen were associated with the rise of leftist parties and organizations, since the poor living and working conditions in the tenements had encouraged workers to join labor unions and the fast-growing Social Democratic Party (SPD). The unique development of Berlin’s built environment also helped to create the impression that the city was driven more by asset accumulation than social or aesthetic concerns, since the physical form of the city was a result of real estate speculation rather than a systematically implemented urban plan. In the ironically entitled The Most Beautiful City in the World, written in 1899 by the industrialist and native Berliner Walter Rathenau, the author lamented this favoring of profit over planning. Describing the city in derisive terms, Rathenau decried the riot of styles and decorative elements that lined city   M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  21

streets and made one feel “as if in a fever dream.”7 He argued that what urban tradition had existed in Berlin—the “royal Prussian” tradition of Andreas Schlüter and Karl Friedrich Schinkel—had been obliterated by explosive growth and industrialization. Whereas the city had once been the “Athens on the Spree,” Rathenau announced that glorious version of Berlin to be dead, replaced by “Chicago on the Spree.”8 The miserable conditions in the Mietskasernen put Berlin at the center of a national debate, the so-called Big Cities Debate (Großstädte Debatte), that had preoccupied German intellectuals and critics since the 1840s and centered on the consequences of the rapid growth of German cities throughout the nineteenth century. In fact, the perception that living conditions in Berlin were much worse than those in other German cities was not entirely accurate. Because of the rapid onset of industrialization and equally rapid growth in population, however, it is true that their deleterious effects were perhaps more shocking and apparent and thus seemed more acute in Berlin. Regardless, this idea that Berlin was a city of slums, a politically active working class, and unchecked speculation and massive wealth was well established by the beginning of the twentieth century. Werner Hegemann’s 1930 book Das steinerne Berlin: Geschichte der grössten Mietskasernenstadt der Welt (Stony Berlin: History of the largest rental-barracks city in the world) confirmed the public’s perception of Berlin’s architecture in particular, helping to establish in the German public’s imagination the image of Berlin as a poorly planned, overbuilt city.9 Subsequent plans to construct and reconstruct Berlin, from the 1930s through the 1960s, were often intended to correct the mistakes that had led to the “stony” city and the Mietskasernen. Later planners, including those working in the postwar era, hoped to develop for the city the kind of unique, beloved, and aesthetically pleasing architectural image that critics like Rathenau had accused it of lacking. Already the most significant political and economic city in Germany, Berlin ascended in the Weimar era to a place of cultural importance as well, taking a place alongside cities such as Dresden and Munich that had until then been considered more important as centers of the arts. By the 1910s and 1920s, Berlin was a major site of innovative cultural production, and this period remains among the city’s most famous epochs, its golden age. The city was home to avant-garde painters, such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and other members of the expressionist group Die Brücke, in the 1900s and 1910s. In the 1920s and 1930s, Berlin was an important center of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) and Dada movements. The Universum Film corporation (known as UFA), which produced Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920), Metropolis (1927), and Der blaue Engel 22  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

(The blue angel, 1930), was formed in Berlin in 1917, making the city an internationally significant center of film production. Architects based in Berlin, such as Peter Behrens, Bruno Taut, and Erich Mendelsohn, developed experimental approaches to building and urban planning in response to the effects of industrialization, the rapid growth of cities, and the profound social and cultural shifts that resulted. Collectively called Neues Bauen (New Building), this architecture encompassed a wide range of reactions to these changes and an equally wide range of aesthetic and programmatic approaches to building. Although varied, these styles were generally avantgarde, including the utopian, visionary schemes of Taut and the sleek, streamlined designs of Mendelsohn and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and all emerged from the modern urban experience, meant either to enhance or to counteract the frenetic experience of modern, urban life.10 For many architects, the goal in embracing a new style and approach to architecture was to address and ultimately solve the problems of the modern metropolis and its masses of people.11 According to the architectural historian Barbara Miller Lane, these architects wanted to create “new, socially conscious architecture which would play a part in the political revolution” and which would “ ‘express’ the new culture and the new society” that resulted.12 Once Germany’s economy stabilized in 1924, many architects and planners worked to implement their ideas in the form of large-scale, publicly funded housing projects. In Berlin, such efforts were led by Martin Wagner, who had been an official with the municipal building authority for Berlin-Schöneberg and who, after 1926, became chief city planner for Greater Berlin. The housing complexes built under Wagner’s tenure, which include Bruno Taut’s Britz-Siedlung (1928) and Großsiedlung Siemensstadt (1929–31; fig. 1.2), made up of buildings designed by Hans Scharoun, Walter Gropius, Hugo Häring, and others, were created using stripped-down, avant-garde aesthetics, partly as an antidote to the dark, cramped Mietskasernen. Wagner created a magazine, Das Neue Berlin (The new Berlin), to publicize his efforts to bring the Neues Bauen style to the attention of the German public as a whole.13 Fig. 1.2 These experiments in art, film, and architecture, combined with Berlin’s rapid and recent growth, helped to make it synonymous with “modernity” as a whole. Other German cities such as Frankfurt and Hamburg experienced many of the same cultural, economic, and social shifts throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and equaled Berlin in importance as centers of modern cultural production, including Neues Bauen. However, it was Berlin that came to represent modern, urban life as well as debates about it, and, in the end, its reputation as a “symbol of modern urbanity” became more important than any facts about its   M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  23

Fig. 1.2. Gro ß siedlung Siemensstadt, Berlin, 1929–31. Hans Scharoun designed the over all conception, while other architects, including Walter Gropius and Hugo Häring, contributed to individual projects. L andesarchiv Berlin / photo: Otto Hagemann.

development.14 It was in part because Berlin was the capital of a newly unified Germany that cultural critics, politicians, and others expressed such anxiety over the city’s figurative and literal image. Berlin’s growth in size, stature, and importance had occurred relatively recently, long after strong regional identities had been established in areas like Bavaria and Saxony. As a result, many Germans looked askance at the notion that Berlin could represent a single German identity or that such an identity even existed. The debates about modernity centered on Berlin were thus also debates about the future of Germany and the kinds of ideals the country should represent. Such debates grew increasingly contentious throughout the Weimar era, when, as the historian Sabine Hake argues, Berlin’s status as the “icon of German mass culture and modernity” became definitively established in the public’s imagination.15 Furthermore, given the increasingly charged political environment in Germany during this time, Berlin’s associations 2 4  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

with artistic experimentation as well as transgressions of social taboos made it an important symbol for both the left and right extremes of the political spectrum.16 While cultural critics and leaders from Germany’s Social Democratic and Communist Parties praised the modern trends fostered in Berlin, representatives of far-right parties like the National Socialist (Nazi) Party detested the city, citing Berlin’s supposed “deviance” as evidence of an overall decline in German culture and society.17 While the two sides of these debates were, and continue to be, viewed according to political spheres of left and right, one cannot say simply that conservative, right-leaning elements eschewed modern, urban culture while radical, leftist groups enthusiastically embraced it. Rather, in their attempt to reconcile modern innovations with historical tradition, artists, architects, and critics in Germany, as in other European cities, responded with opinions and approaches that reflected a wide range of stylistic preferences and political beliefs. For example, the expressionist architect Bruno Taut advocated the “dissolution of cities” in a 1920 book of the same name, proposing that humanity instead live in utopian, mountain communities made up of crystalline glass structures. Taut’s approaches, like those of many of his contemporaries, were neither wholly traditionalist nor progressive but contained elements of both.18 And, despite its condemnation of the work of Martin Wagner and others, the Nazi regime was by no means against all forms of modern art or architecture nor was it uniform in its cultural policies. The Nazis were almost as likely to sponsor modern buildings as to denounce them, and there was no clear or single “Nazi style.”19 Despite such ambiguity in the relationship between style and ideology, cultural debates about modernity, which followed the earlier “Big City Debates,” tended to become more sharply politicized in the Weimar period, and particular aesthetics became more closely associated with particular political values. As Miller Lane argues, the Nazis “saw architectural styles as symbols of specific political views, and they believed this to be more true of architecture than of the other arts.”20 Thus, despite the lack of a specific “Nazi style,” the regime itself helped solidify the perception in the German public’s imagination that architectural styles could be parsed neatly into political categories. Indeed, such was the volatile environment of the time that the perception of a particular individual’s political affiliation often proved more important than his or her actual beliefs. For example, at the Institute of Technology in Berlin, communist students tended to enroll in Hans Poelzig’s seminars, while student members of the National Socialist Party visited those of Heinrich Tessenow despite the fact that both architects, according to the Werkbund historian Joan Campbell, “remained determinedly apolitical.”21 Given the pervasiveness of this   M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  25

belief in a direct correspondence between styles and politics, it is easy to understand why the prewar discourse on architecture and ideology proved instrumental in constructing the cultural, political, and stylistic divisions of the Cold War, especially in divided Berlin. By the time Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, Berlin’s reputation as the capital of modernity was well established. It was one reason why Hitler in particular hated Berlin and did not consider it a “true capital.” So great was his aversion to Berlin that he is said to have felt no dismay over the prospect of its destruction by British bombs.22 As the historian Andrew Lees has argued, “In a very real sense, the Weimar Republic was in the eyes of its opponents the Berlin Republic, and it was entirely plausible for the Nazis to conflate the beginning of their dictatorship with a conquest of a corrupt and chaotic capital.”23 Accordingly, Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, created a new urban plan for Berlin as the capital of Hitler’s empire. Unveiled in January 1938, the plan was designed in part to visually and spatially “cleanse” the city by building monumental, historicized structures situated on a classically symmetrical plan. This plan would purge the city of those populations and buildings that did not fit into the Nazi worldview and, in so doing, re-create Berlin as a stage on which the politics and ideology of the regime would unfold. Therefore, Speer carefully considered the emotional and psychological impact of the new plan to ensure that visitors to and residents of the new capital would be awed by the power of the Nazis and that the resulting built environment would encourage both outward and inward allegiance to the regime (fig. 1.3).24 Size and visual impact were the chief means through which the new capital would impress those who beheld it, and both aspects of the plan were stressed again and again by Speer and Hitler as they outlined their vision of “Germania” and its intended effect. Speer was of the opinion that “impressive public buildings, like monuments, must be planned to be freely visible from all sides,” thus heightening their effect on viewers. Visitors would begin to take in this sight as soon as they arrived in Berlin, entering the city through the South Rail Station that was to be built at the southern terminus of the central, axial boulevard. Upon leaving the station, visitors would, claimed Speer, “be overwhelmed, or rather stunned, by the urban scene and thus the power of the Reich.”25 The unprecedented scale of the buildings and of the plan itself would also express the regime’s power. The dome of the Great Hall, for example, was to be 954 feet high, and the building itself would accommodate between 150,000 and 180,000 people.26 Speer’s and Hitler’s schemes were thwarted, however, when the demands of waging a world war overwhelmed construction efforts. Ultimately, only one of the plan’s buildings, the House of German Tourism 26  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

Fig. 1.3. Albert Speer, model for World Capital Germania (Welthauptstadt Germania), view of northsouth a xis, ca. 1939–44. Bundesarchiv, Bild 146 III-373 .

  27

(1939–40), was constructed. Nonetheless, the Nazis’ plan for Berlin cast a long shadow over plans for Berlin’s postwar reconstruction. Because Speer and Hitler had created such a comprehensive, totalizing vision of Berlin, one full of visual and dramatic impact, postwar planners needed an equally powerful counterimage to symbolically cancel it out and to differentiate their Berlin from that of the Nazis. Also like Speer and Hitler, postwar planners would be required to respond to Berlin’s reputation as a capital of modernity and Mietskasernen. Although the physical destruction wrought by the war rendered the city almost unrecognizable, Germans’ divisive opinions about Berlin were not erased upon the declaration of a “zero hour” (Stunde null) at the war’s end, and both positive and negative feelings toward the city lingered.27 Echoing prewar sentiments regarding the city, West Germany’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, considered the city to be devoid of genuine culture in comparison with his native Cologne.28 Moreover, Berlin’s continued associations with the militarism of the Prussian Empire, with social critique and radicalism, and with the tyranny of the Nazis would remain a factor in the postwar image of the city and its role in East/West German national identity.

Rebuilding Berlin

World War II drew to a close with the siege of Berlin, which began on April 16, 1945. Fighting the last resistance street by street, the Soviet army took the city on May 2, and the war officially ended on May 8, 1945, with Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Allies. The end of the war marked the beginning of a new set of political struggles and a period of growing divides within Germany and Berlin. Geographic partitioning was followed soon after by political and economic disputes, which grew more contentious over time. These governmental and ideological divisions ultimately led to spatial and architectural demarcation, which became increasingly entrenched over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, as architects and planners were obliged to situate themselves physically and aesthetically along Cold War divides. Architects and planners working in the divided city were faced with the question of whether or not to embrace modern styles and planning approaches, even as the definition and symbolic significance of both were evolving precisely because of their use as weapons in the Cold War. Ultimately, two projects would establish the role of planning and architecture in divided Berlin: the Stalinallee development in eastern Berlin and the Interbau exhibition and development in western Berlin. However, to understand why Berlin, and the architecture, planning, and propaganda 28  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

staged within it, took on such a heightened and global significance by the 1950s, one must first recognize that the divisions of Germany and Berlin were somewhat inadvertent, intended to be temporary, and occurred gradually, over a period of time. It is therefore important first to recount the specific events that followed the end of World War II and led to the creation of West and East Germany. By January 1944, Allied forces had already made plans regarding the postwar administration of Germany and had agreed that the country would be divided into three zones of occupation, to be administered by Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. At the Yalta conference in February 1945, the heads of the three occupying nations, Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill, confirmed these earlier plans with some amendments, which included adding France as a fourth occupying power. The decision was made to divide up the capital city of Berlin as well, since it was too strategically important to cede to just one of the four powers. It was further agreed that each Allied power would exercise virtually autonomous control over its own zone but that issues concerning the country as a whole and/or Berlin would be decided by a joint body called the Allied Control Council. However, despite attempts at collective administration, the fundamentally opposing views of the western and eastern forces of occupation were evident from the start. Although all four countries agreed on the so-called “four-d” approach—denazification, demilitarization, decartelization, and democratization—there was no consensus as to how these goals would be achieved. Moreover, because each country had control of its own zone, each was allowed to carry out its own policies in its zone of occupation. The result was that postwar administration in each of the four zones reflected the social, political, and economic values of its occupying force, starting Germany on the path toward its ultimate division.29 On June 20, 1948, the deutsche mark was introduced in Germany’s western sectors as part of a currency reform stipulated by the US-sponsored Marshall Plan. Three days later, when the new currency was introduced in western Berlin, the Soviets balked, insisting that the city was under their control since it was inside their zone of occupation. In protest against the western Allies’ actions and in an attempt to gain control over all of Berlin, Stalin declared a blockade of the city’s western sectors beginning on the night of June 23–24, 1948. The western Allies, led by the United States, responded with an airlift, flying food and supplies into the city throughout the blockade. Realizing the western powers would not back down, Stalin was forced to acknowledge their continued presence in Berlin, and he lifted the blockade on May 12, 1949. The conflict proved that the differences be  M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  29

tween the eastern and western powers were insurmountable. The founding of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD), or Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany), just eleven days later, on May 23, 1949, was thus not so much the beginning of Germany’s division but the culmination of a series of divides, which were further confirmed with the declaration of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), or German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany), in October of the same year. The blockade cemented Berlin’s symbolic status as the ultimate “prize” in the fight for dominance in Germany: whoever controlled Berlin would take the country as a whole, symbolically if not literally. It was because of the city’s symbolic importance that the eastern and western powers refused to concede their sectors of Berlin, meaning that the blockade effectively ensured the continued division of Berlin. In 1948, Berlin’s municipal government was split in two parts, and the Soviet representative left the Allied Control Council. In the wake of these events, the question of Berlin’s political status (that is, whether it belonged to East or West Germany) was a particularly thorny one. From the western powers’ perspective, the fourpower status of Berlin represented their legal claim to the city, and their presence was therefore necessary to show their military and moral support for the city. At the same time, western Berlin’s location presented challenges for its incorporation into West Germany. In addition, most West German politicians did not support Berlin’s integration, partly because of a lingering aversion to Prussia, then closely associated with the Nazi regime.30 For these reasons, the 1949 constitution of the Federal Republic pointedly did not make Berlin a part of West Germany; it continued to recognize the Allied Control Council as the governing body of the city and thereby maintained the western powers’ legal right to Berlin. The small town of Bonn was named West Germany’s “provisional” capital, and Berlin was represented in the federal parliament, or Bundestag, by a nonvoting delegate appointed by its municipal government. East Germany and the Soviet Union continued to disavow western Berlin’s occupation by the west, and in 1949, when the GDR was founded, Berlin was made the capital of the new country. The debate about the city’s status, the so-called Berlin Question, would not be resolved until 1961, when the closure of the border between eastern and western Berlin definitively divided the city for the long term. The reconstruction of the city that began in the 1950s took place against the backdrop of this unsettled Berlin Question. The task of rebuilding Berlin was already under way even before the creation of West and East Germany. Years of aerial bombing and the street fighting at the close of the war destroyed three-fourths of Berlin’s buildings and, depending on the 30  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

district, left one-third to one-half of the city’s housing uninhabitable. The reconstruction effort therefore began with the removal of the thousands of tons of rubble under which the city was buried. By late 1945, a number of different plans for the reconstruction of the city had been proffered, and all of them had several goals in common. All approached the widespread destruction as an opportunity to correct the mistakes of past urban plans, in particular the infamous 1862 Hobrecht Plan and the Mietskasernen it had inadvertently produced. All attempted to create a city that broke with past traditions but also referred to or was somehow integrated with Berlin’s and Germany’s history, and all grappled with what this simultaneously “new” and “historic” city might look like.31 Architecture and urban planning were particularly effective weapons in the Cold War, first because of the pressing need to make war-torn German cities once again habitable. Occupying forces knew that providing comfortable housing was likely to ingratiate residents with particular regimes and thus help in the battle for “hearts and minds.” Second, the practical necessity for buildings was enhanced by the fact that the literal reconstruction of Berlin and of Germany was seen as symbolic of the reformation and renewal of the “damaged” psyche of the German people.32 This aspect of the need to rebuild was especially important given the country’s recent past and the horrific deeds of the Nazis, which had been brought to worldwide attention in part through the publicity surrounding the trials of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. This “working through” of the past, known in German as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, was essential for the establishment of political legitimacy in East and West Germany.33 Berlin was a central site wherein each government attempted to articulate a national identity that distanced it from the Nazi regime and proved it was the true and rightful Germany. Not only was Berlin Germany’s capital, but the city’s division was still thought of as temporary. Therefore, as reconstruction began, what was at stake was not simply who would rebuild the city but who would control it. The rebuilding efforts of the capitalist and communist occupiers were one way in which those powers sought to prove their commitment to the city and to show its citizens how they envisioned Berlin’s redevelopment under their stewardship. Accordingly, architects and sponsoring governments sought to create a visual and political identity for their Berlin that differentiated it from the “other” Berlin, linking it favorably to certain aspects of the city’s past while condemning the Nazi era. As government officials in postwar Berlin were deciding how to craft a specific political, aesthetic, and cultural identity for the city, the decision of whether or not to use styles associated with Neues Bauen would play an increasingly central role in their discourse. While GDR officials publicly   M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  3 1

repudiated modern styles in 1949, the postwar period marked the beginning of a period in which modern architecture was widely embraced in the west generally.34 In particular, a rectilinear, steel-and-glass style of Neues Bauen, typified by the buildings of Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and by the designs produced at the Bauhaus after 1924, was endorsed by the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM, or International Congress on Modern Architecture) and used in the postwar reconstruction of Western European cities like London and Rotterdam, as well as in the construction of American corporate and government buildings. CIAM, whose members included preeminent modern architects from all over the world, was very influential in the postwar dissemination of this particular kind of Neues Bauen. The group advocated for the style’s use in major projects such as the United Nations Headquarters building (New York, NY; Harrison and Abramovitz, 1947–50), which had been based on a design by Le Corbusier, and their approach influenced urban plans for several cities, including Berlin. The CIAM’s Charter of Athens, drafted in 1933, provided guidelines for urban planning that were widely adopted in Western Europe and the United States. Key principles outlined in the charter included recommendations for zoning, that is, partitioning urban space based on its function, as well as the creation of motorways to allow for the free circulation of cars within the city and the use of the “resources of modern technology” to ameliorate the problems of urban growth.35 Styles associated with Neues Bauen had already gained some prominence in the prewar period, when they were publicized in journals like Wagner’s The New Berlin and in publications and exhibitions in other countries. Most notable among the latter was The International Style: Architecture since 1922, a 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson that introduced architects such as Mies van der Rohe, J. J. P. Oud, and Walter Gropius to museum visitors in the United States. The interpretation of the style, as presented in the exhibition, was indebted to prewar histories of Neues Bauen written by émigrés Sigfried Giedion, Nikolas Pevsner, and Emil Kaufmann. These works framed the history and genealogy of modernism in particular ways, placing it within an overall narrative vis-à-vis European but also American architectural traditions.36 In such histories, modern architecture was posited as both a response and a challenge to earlier styles of architecture, particularly nineteenth-century historicized architecture, and was defined almost exclusively by its formal attributes, with little to no discussion of the possible influence of social, political, or economic considerations.37 A preference is shown for the works of architects like Gropius, Oud, and Mies van der Rohe, while architects who worked in a so-called 32   M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

“irrational” or “expressionistic” vein, such as Bruno Taut or Erich Mendelsohn, are given little treatment or are ignored altogether. For example, in the catalog for The International Style, Hitchcock and Johnson name the “four leaders of modern architecture” as Le Corbusier, Oud, Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. They acknowledge other innovators as well, including Erich Mendelsohn, despite what they term “his lingering dalliance with Expressionism.”38 According to Panayotis Tournikiotis in The Historiography of Modern Architecture, histories like those written by Giedion, Pevsner, and Kaufmann define modern architecture as “original, independent of tradition, liberated from imitation of the styles of the past, opposed to the convictions of the nineteenth century. Thus it is in complete rift with the past and past tradition. Everything is brand new: modern architecture is something that has never existed before, a new spirit composing forms without precedent.”39 Partly as a result of these histories, the idea that Neues Bauen encompassed a range of differing aesthetics, planning approaches, and attitudes toward modernity was gradually amended until prewar, avantgarde architecture was, after 1945, viewed within a narrow set of primarily aesthetic parameters. Moreover, many of the architects in Western Europe and the United States who completed their education in the immediate postwar period accepted this type of modern architecture as “incontrovertible fact,” the only appropriate style in which to work.40 Definitions of modern architecture, as outlined in these histories, would also prove significant in the postwar reconstruction of Berlin because of the way they situated the style in relation to the United States. In Space, Time and Architecture, for example, Giedion traced the prehistory of modern architecture to the United States, specifically to commercial architecture in Chicago in the nineteenth century. In buildings like William Le Baron Jenney’s Home Insurance Building (1884–85; demolished), Giedion saw evidence of an integration of architecture and engineering that, according to him, would not be achieved in Europe until the early part of the twentieth century. As they understood it, Giedion and others also saw within the modern style values that were popularly regarded as quintessentially “American”: a strong belief in the power of new technologies to organize and advance society, a focus on the “future” made possible by such technologies, and a disavowal of the “outmoded” past. Moreover, because modern architecture and painting had been denounced by Europe’s fascist regimes as “degenerate,” both became associated with defiance toward antidemocratic rulers. The United States in the postwar period became a bastion for the so-called “International style,” which became in and of itself a symbol of progressivism and the “democratic spirit.”41 As discussed later,   M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  33

the narrowed definition of modern architecture, together with its symbolic associations, made it an ideal instrument of architectural identity-building and differentiation in the context of Cold War Berlin. In 1946, plans were drafted to guide reconstruction in Berlin as a whole. However, when the city’s municipal government split in 1948, so too did its joint planning commission. From this point, governments of the eastern and western sectors set about creating their own separate vision of their “new Berlin,” and their first efforts would influence planning and architecture throughout the subsequent decades.42 As outlined above, each government’s endorsement or rejection of particular architectural approaches was a decisive factor in determining the kinds of projects that were built in the 1950s. However, just as influential was the relationship between Berlin’s eastern and western zones and their occupying forces. Sponsoring governments provided models for the political and economic systems established in eastern and western Berlin and for the architectural projects constructed in each. Sponsoring governments’ material and financial support, or lack thereof, in their zones of Berlin also determined the scale and scope of what could be built. Finally, Berliners’ attitudes toward the occupying forces of east versus west were a factor in the reception of finished projects and influenced the extent to which the values and ideals represented in these projects resonated with local populations. A comparison between western Berlin’s project to rebuild the Hansa district, celebrated in an international building exhibition held in 1956–57, and the construction of the Stalinallee development in eastern Berlin highlights not only the differences between the architecture and planning ideals in east and west but also how the governments of each framed themselves and their Berlin in relation to the burgeoning notions of East and West German identity.

Building Socialism on Stalinallee

In the GDR, efforts to reconstruct Berlin in the early 1950s were carried out within the context of the much-touted National Construction Program (Nationales Aufbauprogramm, or NAP). Announced in 1950, the NAP was connected to the GDR’s first Five Year Plan (1950–55) and had as its goals construction throughout the GDR, to include not only housing but also sports halls, cultural centers, and entirely new urban developments, such as Stalinstadt, “the first socialist city in the GDR.”43 In Berlin’s eastern sector, designated the focus of the program, the most widely publicized phase of the NAP commenced with the construction of a housing development northeast of the Mitte district along the Stalinallee, dubbed “Germany’s first socialist street.”44 An important focus of the NAP was creating an 34  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

autonomous identity for the new nation and a sense of stability and security in the heavily damaged and still-divided capital city. Stylistically, architects used historical decorative motifs borrowed from Berlin-specific architectural traditions and generally adhered to the model of “socialist realist” architecture favored by the Soviet Union under Stalin. The program was accompanied by an extensive propaganda campaign that established a narrative of “construction” or “buildup” (Aufbau) in which every German was cast as a builder of the new, socialist German nation. The influence of the Soviet Union was evident in the architectural style of the apartments on Stalinallee, in the new name of its main thoroughfare, and indeed in the structure of the GDR state itself. The reorganization of the Soviet zone was led by the Soviet Military Administration (Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland, or SMAD), which stocked government posts with German communists known to be loyal to the Soviet Union. In June 1946, the German Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) was created through the forced union of Germany’s Social Democratic and Communist Parties, consolidating the power of the country’s left-leaning parties in the Soviet zone. Once the GDR was founded in 1949, the country was nominally a multiparty socialist republic and would remain so until 1990. Nonetheless, throughout its existence, the SED would act as the equivalent of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and wield complete power over East Germany’s political, economic, and social development. The party was headed by a general secretary who was in turn the head of the SED Politburo. All major party decisions were made by the Politburo and its Central Committee, a governing body made up of an elite cadre of Politburo members. In June 1950, Walter Ulbricht, a German communist who had spent the war in exile in the Soviet Union, was elected general secretary of the SED and remained supreme leader of the GDR until he was deposed in 1971.45 Ulbricht and the GDR’s new leaders hailed the Stalin regime for liberating Germany from the Nazis and worked to bring their country closer to the Soviet Union in many ways, such as adopting a Soviet-style planned economy.46 Yet, there was also extreme antagonism between the two countries. When the Red Army entered Berlin, it was with deep bitterness toward the Germans for having started the war. As they marched across and then occupied Germany, Red Army soldiers took their revenge by looting and destroying property and by terrorizing the German population. German woman were particular targets; it is estimated that in Berlin alone more than one hundred thousand women were raped in the months following the end of the war.47 The Soviet Union generally took an approach to postwar occupation that focused on punishing the Germans, chiefly   M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  35

by exacting war reparations from the GDR. To this end, the SMAD went about dismantling the industrial complex of the Soviet zone, shipping a large portion of the resources and infrastructure of what would become East Germany to the Soviet Union. By the end of 1946, more than one thousand factories in the eastern zone of occupation had been dismantled, and the production capacity of the zone, already damaged by the war, was reduced by 35 to 80 percent, depending on the industrial sector. In addition, a percentage of the production of those factories that did remain was siphoned off to benefit the Soviet economy. Because of both reparations burdens and the dismantling of the infrastructure in the Soviet zone, the GDR was from the outset put at a severe economic disadvantage in comparison with the Federal Republic.48 As the reconstruction effort began in eastern Berlin, it was complicated not only by the GDR’s economic instability but also by GDR-Soviet conflict over the Berlin Question. Soviet officials urged Ulbricht to scale back his policies and thereby stem the tide of refugees leaving the GDR through divided Berlin. Instead, Ulbricht focused more of the country’s resources and attention on the NAP and on the city’s eastern zone, announcing ambitious plans for reconstruction and promising grand and luxurious housing for all GDR citizens. Moreover, the NAP projects, especially the housing on Stalinallee, were designed as expressions of official, SED-endorsed notions of GDR identity, which was characterized as fundamentally “antifascist” and emerging from existing German traditions. The themes of antifascism and historical tradition were yoked to architectural projects through the official building policy, especially the so-called Sixteen Principles of Urban Planning (Sechzehn Grundsätze des Städtebaues), and in the discourse on the literal and figurative Aufbau, or buildup, of the GDR state. Official conceptions of GDR identity were based in part on the interpretation of German socialism and the Nazi period as outlined by Ulbricht in his book Die Legende vom Deutschen Sozialismus (The legend of German socialism), authored during his time in exile and published in 1945. The book, of which tens of thousands of copies were published in the immediate postwar years, presents a history and analysis of the Nazi regime, detailing the role played by German communists during that era. Specifically, Ulbricht’s history argued that Hitler’s regime was the product of a particularly extreme form of capitalism, which took hold in the country despite the best efforts of Germany’s communists.49 The German Communist Party was itself ultimately blameless, he argued, and the German people were likewise exonerated despite the massive popular support Hitler and his party had enjoyed. Instead, Ulbricht laid the bulk of the blame for the Nazis’ crimes on the “arms industrialists and leaders of banks” who, 36  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

he claimed, had financed and thus made possible Hitler’s war.50 Ulbricht further argued that the Social Democrats were also partially culpable for the rise of German fascism and for World War II, since they had not united with the German Communist Party. However, the Soviet Union and Red Army were to be credited for freeing Germany from Hitler’s rule and setting the country back on its original, antifascist path. This discourse of antifascism extended beyond Ulbricht’s book. When, in the early 1950s, Ulbricht and his allies consolidated the SED’s power by arresting or otherwise eliminating their opponents from the ranks of the GDR government, they did so under the pretense of antifascism, arguing that they were eliminating remaining Nazi tendencies from the country.51 Furthermore, Ulbricht and the SED asserted that their fight against capitalism and “western imperialism” was tantamount to a fight against Nazism. By extension, East German citizens’ loyalty to the SED government would prove their own repudiation of the Nazi era. In subsequent decades, the party would point to the personnel purges of the early 1950s and its own supposed history of antifascism to make the claim that the SED had decisively resolved any lingering questions related to anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, or the crimes of the Nazis. Such questions, party leaders would argue, did not need to be further debated and could be officially laid to rest.52 This use of the past as an instrument of political legitimization and exculpation in the postwar years helps explain the SED’s overall willingness to engage with history as a tool in constructing national identity and in staking its claim as the “true” Germany, although to be sure this was a history colored by its own largely mendacious interpretations. Moreover, the appeal to historical traditions was particularly useful in Berlin, since the oldest and most historically significant sections of Berlin—the Museum Island, for example—were in the eastern zone. The SED’s appeal to historical traditions helps explain why initial designs for the reconstruction of Berlin’s eastern sector represented a rejection of modern styles, instead employing historically derived architectural aesthetics and urban planning models that differed from those embraced in the western sectors. In the 1950s, official policy in the Soviet Union and the GDR stipulated that modern styles constituted “formalism” and were thus officially repudiated, by both Stalin and the SED.53 In the GDR, in place of the CIAM’s Charter of Athens, the SED adopted the Sixteen Principles of Urban Planning, which were drafted by East German architects after a 1950 trip to Moscow and based on Soviet planning guidelines.54 In contrast to the Charter of Athens, the Sixteen Principles rejected zoning and cautioned against allowing too much vehicle traffic in inner-city areas, stating, “Traffic should serve the city and its people. It should not fragment the city nor   M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  37

should it hinder its citizens.”55 The Sixteen Principles also rejected the notion of turning the modern metropolis into a “garden city.”56 Instead, the principles prescribed reconstruction that incorporated aspects of the city’s past development, its authors arguing, “At the basis of urban planning must be the principles of the organic and the regard for the historic origins of the city’s structure while at the same time correcting the mistakes of these past plans.”57 For the SED, the use of historic styles was a way of establishing continuity between the broader history of Germany and its own regime; it was also designed to create the sense of a shared national past. According to the Central Committee, in its 1951 reconstruction proposal, “The new Berlin will grow out of the old Berlin.” The proposal also stated, “We want a national, German style of architecture, one that is derived from the great masters of German building history.”58 The model for the reconstruction would come from the “national tradition,” especially architectural styles of “around 1800.”59 The SED used economic arguments to advocate for the historically based approach as well. Unlike modernist buildings in which, officials argued, the use of decorative elements was avoided in order to maximize profit, these buildings would feature elaborate embellishment and thereby create luxurious “dwelling palaces” (Wohnpaläste) for the working class.60 To this end, the interiors of the apartments were to be outfitted with furnishings based on earlier traditions, such as the Biedermeier and Chippendale styles. According to party leaders, such historicized design provided proof of the GDR’s commitment not only to native culture and the domestic comfort of the working class but also to handicraft approaches that honored labor, as opposed to an industrialized aesthetic that symbolized the workers’ subjugation to or replacement by the machine.61 The Sixteen Principles translated into an overall plan for the Stalinallee development based on the preexisting layout of the district. The project was built around a wide central boulevard that followed the path of the former Große Frankfurter Straße and Frankfurter Allee, both renamed Stalinallee. The boulevard was punctuated by several “gate-squares” (Torplätze), such as Strausberger Platz (fig. 1.4) and Frankfurter Tor, which were placed on or near the site of former street crossings. The upper floors of the structures built along Stalinallee contained apartments, while lower floors were occupied by cafés, restaurants, shops, and other leisure and entertainment venues. The buildings’ designs referenced works by native Berlin architects of the past. The Weberwiese high-rise (Hochhaus Weberwiese) was said to be modeled on Schinkel’s Feilner House (1828), which had been destroyed during the war. Other buildings were faced with ceramic plates featuring pictorial motifs based on those created by Schlüter for the Royal Arsenal on 38  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

Fig. 1.4. View looking east down Stalinallee from Str ausberger Platz, 1954. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-245890009 / photo: Heinz Funck / ADN.

Unter den Linden (1694–1729).62 Model Stalinallee apartments were outfitted with wooden furniture, stuffed sofas upholstered with floral patterns, lace curtains and tablecloths, and ornate ceramic sculptures (fig. 1.5). The historic focus of reconstruction in the GDR was reflected in the renovation of some of the prewar buildings lining Berlin’s historic Unter den Linden boulevard as well. The restoration of the Berlin State Opera House (Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, 1741–43) and the Neue Wache (Karl Friedrich Schinkel, 1816–18) were both part of the NAP.63 In addition, historical ties were communicated through spatial connections in the overall conception of eastern Berlin’s urban plan. The Stalinallee development, located to the northeast of Berlin’s historic center, was linked in eastern Berlin’s urban plan with the Unter den Linden and the Brandenburg Gate, a widely recognized symbol of the city.64 In this way, the SED connected the GDR literally and symbolically with the historic traditions of Germany in its national capital, thereby symbolically making the claim that it, and not the Federal Republic, was the more legitimate Germany.   M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  39

Fig. 1.5. Interior of Stalinallee model apartment, 1950. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183 - 08344 - 0003 / photo: Horst Sturm / ADN.

Construction along Stalinallee began in early 1952 and was accompanied by a large-scale publicity campaign. This campaign helped shape public understanding of the development, manage its reception, and communicate the buildings’ intended political significance. The campaign’s propaganda focused on the physical reconstruction of the GDR, especially in its capital, tying this literal construction to the establishment of the socialist state. This metaphor of physical and political construction was established in the SED’s Aufbau des Sozialismus (Buildup of Socialism) program, a slate of economic, political, and social changes announced in July 1952. The word Aufbau was intentionally used to conjure up notions of not just construction (bauen) but of “building up” or “assembly” (aufbauen), which in turn reflected the political function of both the Aufbau des Sozialismus program and the NAP. As part of the Aufbau des Sozialismus program, the nation’s architects and all of its workers were tasked with building the new (East) German nation. In poems and songs, metaphors borrowed from architecture were used to describe this effort to build up 40  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

the House of Socialism (Haus des Sozialismus).65 Stalin became the “master builder of a new world” (Baumeister einen neuen Welt), while Ulbricht was a “master builder of socialism” (Baumeister des Sozialismus). The Stalinallee development was a particular focus of Aufbau cultural production and was often portrayed as both a heroic and collective effort. For example, in his poem “Stalinallee” (1953), Kurt Barthel (known as KuBa) wrote, “And as we cleared rubble and made our plans / Devised greenways and house blocks / Then we were victors, and the city began to live.”66 Many visual artists made the construction project and its workers the subject of their paintings, as in Heinz Drache’s Das Volk sagt “Ja” zum friedlichen Aufbau (The people say “yes” to the peaceful reconstruction, 1952) and Oswald Ebert’s Montage Stalinallee (1952). As Drache’s reference to “peaceful reconstruction” also suggests, in the contested city of Berlin, the activities associated with the NAP and the Aufbau program were framed as a rejection of the western Allies and a repudiation of the division of both Germany and Berlin. As the first of the two governments to begin building in Berlin, the SED argued that it was more concerned than the western powers with the current and future prosperity of Germany. The government presented the National Construction Program as the first real effort in establishing a “democratic, peaceful, and independent Germany.”67 While western powers, according to Ulbricht and the SED, “invested in militarism in preparation for the destruction of Germany,” the NAP was a “lever for the expansion of the struggle over peace, the struggle for the unity of Germany, [and] the struggle for the unity of Berlin.”68 Banners adorning the building site at Stalinallee furthermore declared its construction “an effective weapon in the struggle over the unity of Berlin and all of Germany.”69 The effort to reconstruct Berlin was deemed a “national task” and centered on the goal of “reconstructing the capital of Germany, Berlin, in such a beautiful and dignified way, that the capital of the future, united Germany will be regarded as a symbol of progress.”70 The focus of SED Aufbau program propaganda was on the collective labor required to build the new, socialist, and singular German nation. While paintings, poems, and songs valorized the Stalinallee and its construction workers, the SED’s newspaper, Neues Deutschland, was filled with photographs that emphasized the wide variety of East Germans who were contributing to the effort. Images showed men, woman, and even young children and celebrities chipping in at the building site, with engineers and architects working alongside less skilled workers.71 Publicity posters detailed the progress on the construction site by enumerating the amount of rubble removed and building materials used month by month, and   M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  41

workers’ brigades noted the fulfillment of their quotas on large billboards placed in public areas (fig. 1.6).72 Such measures emphasized the collective nature of the GDR’s socialist government and were attempts on the part of the SED to convince the public, in the east and west, that it enjoyed broad, popular support (fig. 1.7). The Stalinallee development was in many ways a success. As a result of it, many East Germans were afforded much-needed housing in apartments that were comfortable and fairly grand. The units were relatively large in size and featured central heating, telephones, and private, as opposed to shared, bathrooms. The development and its associated propaganda were also effective in publicizing the GDR’s commitment to Berlin and Germany’s reconstruction, at least initially. In addition, the discourse around the NAP established a system of representation in the GDR in which architecture, especially housing, was linked to political life in the country in specific ways. Urban construction, especially in Berlin, was tied very explicitly with the figurative construction of the state, and the architect and construction worker were framed as allegorical figures representing every (East) German who participated in the establishment of the new, socialist Germany. Specific projects, such as Stalinallee, were through this propaganda linked closely with the SED and became symbols of the party’s promises to its people about the kind of values and ideals it would work to establish. However, the NAP projects also represented a superficial engagement with the past, wherein “history” was reduced to signification and the difficult questions raised by the Nazi era were suppressed. These aspects of architecture and propaganda in the 1950s—a time subsequently referred to in the GDR as the Aufbau period—would continue to inform SED policy on building as well as public discourse on issues such as housing and political engagement throughout the subsequent decades. Also established in the Aufbau period was the discourse on modern architecture and design in the GDR.73 Officially, modern architecture was denigrated by the SED, and Walter Ulbricht was among its loudest detractors. In speeches delivered in 1950 and 1951, Ulbricht argued that in choosing designs that were historic as opposed to modern, architects at work on the Stalinallee buildings and indeed all NAP buildings would avoid the influence of American social and economic values. Buildings designed according to these values were dubbed “American boxes” and “Hitleresque barracks,” and the “formalism” of the “Bauhaus style” was criticized for being too theoretical and unconnected with regional styles or traditions.74 Ulbricht maintained that these buildings were too international and “cosmopolitan” and could be built just as easily in “America as in Africa.” By building in styles that were specific to Germany’s architectural history, 42  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l

Fig. 1.6. Workers from the Friedrich Ebert building collective record their daily tallies of hours worked at the Stalinallee construction site, 1952. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-162770006 / photo: Krueger / ADN.

  M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  43

Fig. 1.7. Press service photo of the Stalinallee construction site, 1952. The original caption reads, “Young construction workers report for their ‘service for Germany.’ The call to service for the German people has been answered enthusiastically by Berlin’s youth.” Bundesarchiv, Bild 183 - 15711 - 0001 / photo: Hans-Günter Quaschinsky / ADN.

argued Ulbricht and the SED, the GDR would avoid becoming, as the Federal Republic had, “colonized” by the “imperialist” forces of the United States.75 Ulbricht’s rhetoric reflected an understanding of modern architecture as established by CIAM and in histories by Siegfried Giedion and others. He described the modern style primarily in aesthetic and visual terms, and 4 4  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

the terms he used—boxes (Kästen), living cells (Wohnzellen)—primarily evoke the kind of rectilinear, steel-and-glass architecture extolled in exhibitions like The International Style. Ulbricht also cited specific projects that fit within this definition, such as housing designed by Hans Scharoun and built on Stalinallee in 1949. Ulbricht furthermore connected modern architecture explicitly with the United States and therefore, following his own equation of capitalism with fascism, with Hitler’s regime. Yet, by criticizing modern architecture as “cosmopolitan,” Ulbricht used the same language to condemn modern architecture as had the Nazis in their own condemnation of Neues Bauen.76 Thus, through his rhetoric, Ulbricht reinforced the western discourse on modern architecture, implicitly confirming its western definition. Ulbricht and the SED’s brutal and oppressive governance, along with their use of Nazi rhetoric in discussing modern architecture, seemed to substantiate the claims of western cultural critics that modern styles and approaches were fundamentally progressive—politically, economically, and technologically—and that they were uniquely tied to American values. At the same time, historical styles favored in the GDR were made to seem regressive because of their associations with the Nazi era. The housing at Stalinallee was ultimately derided by western architects and intellectuals as the built expression of an oppressive, dictatorial government. Critics argued that the buildings’ “monumentality” was reminiscent of Nazi architecture, and the use of historicized designs and highly decorative façades for the structures was called hopelessly retrograde and dismissed as “confectionery-style” (Zuckerbäckerstil) architecture.77 Many East German architects also regarded the adoption of historicized, decorative architectural styles with suspicion and embarrassment and wondered why the SED did not elect to adopt the more obviously “antifascist” (given its criticism by the Nazis) styles of Neues Bauen.78 For many of these architects and designers, prewar styles of modern architecture were linked not with capitalism but with socialism. As discussed later, several left-leaning, politically engaged architects who had been practitioners of Neues Bauen before the war, such as Mart Stam and Hans Schmidt, relocated to the GDR with the objective of using modern architecture as a tool to realize socialist community. Like many East Germans, these architects and designers were committed to socialist ideals but did not necessarily endorse the SED regime. Moreover, these architects defined the modern approach in ways fundamentally different from those employed by Ulbricht and western critics and historians. These architects’ reactions to the SED’s architectural policies and propaganda are understandable. It remains rather perplexing, for example, that the SED would choose to emphasize Berlin’s “historical traditions”   M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  45

given the fact that that city had so often been charged with lacking in precisely such a tradition and had been defined instead by its modernity. Clearly, the party believed that the explicit labeling of particular buildings and styles as “imperialist” or “democratic” would be enough to grant such buildings the desired political and nationalist character. Its approach to rhetoric was an extension of the SED’s overall method of governance: topdown, rather than bottom-up. The party had pursued utter domination over all aspects of life in East Germany since its formation in 1950 and had done little to ingratiate East Germans. Ulbricht’s Aufbau program required traditional social, political, and economic organizations to make radical changes that were drastic and unpopular. Nonetheless, Ulbricht insisted on pursuing policies such as the forced collectivization of agriculture despite the widespread upheaval and protest they had caused. Moreover, the SED’s claims to antifascism were undermined by its own actions, such as Ulbricht’s use of Nazi rhetoric and the nationalistic tone of party propaganda. The party’s public allegiance to the Soviet Union, a regime many Germans regarded with disgust, likewise discredited it. Thus, while some East Germans, such as Kurt Barthel and Heinz Drache, were apparently enthusiastic about Stalinallee and what it represented, others were more ambivalent. Some were committed to socialism but rejected the SED and its “socialist realist” aesthetic. Still others, such as the architect Hermann Henselmann, navigated a more complex relationship between their own principles and the SED’s proscriptions. Henselmann was an adherent to and defender of modern architecture in postwar GDR, but he ultimately renounced his allegiance to Neues Bauen and conformed to party doctrine. In 1951, he created a socialist realist design for the Weberwiese high-rise on Stalinallee and subsequently became a party favorite and celebrity architect in the GDR. Despite Henselmann’s public posturing, his enduring interest in Neues Bauen styles of architecture was revealed in his design for the House of Teachers (1962–64).79 Indeed, while modern architecture was officially denounced by the SED, this censure did not completely extinguish discourse on modern building, planning, and design in the GDR. This kind of negotiation with the regime, wherein architects and designers would alternately subvert and accommodate the SED, would characterize much of the discourse on architecture that was to follow. Ulbricht’s lofty promises about what could be achieved with the Stalinallee development and the larger National Construction Program were ultimately undermined by the country’s growing economic and social problems. On June 16, 1953, three hundred workers from the Stalinallee site marched to the House of Ministers on Leipzigstraße, protesting continu46  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

ing shortages of food and basic commodities and demanding a reduction of the recently increased work norms. Eventually, tens of thousands of East Germans throughout the country joined the mass demonstration. The uprising was quickly quashed when Soviet troops supported by tanks broke up demonstrations, ultimately leading to the deaths of more than fifty protesters.80 What followed was the period of “Stalinization” during which Ulbricht and his followers ousted their critics, consolidated their power, and tightened control over East German politics, economics, and society. Conditions in the GDR did improve somewhat in the late 1950s. Industrial production rose overall from 1957 to 1959, and the pace of emigration slackened, falling in 1958. As the historian Hermann Weber argues, “The majority did not identify with the GDR system[;] still, they began to come to terms with it.”81 Even so, the country’s continuing problems meant that the prestige-project approach represented by the NAP could not be sustained in the long term. East Germany simply did not have the labor power or access to raw materials that would have made more Stalinallee-type developments possible. In his 1951 speech on the NAP, Ulbricht was already signaling a shift to “standardization” in building as part of an effort to cut building costs. Nonetheless, the NAP and Stalinallee marked a formative moment for the GDR’s architectural policy, both in the establishment of Berlin as the central site for the construction of national identity and in the top-down approach to defining the political meaning of particular architectural styles.

Reeducating West Germany and the 1957 International Building Exhibition

In contrast to the GDR, the postwar period in the Federal Republic and western Berlin was characterized by relatively rapid economic recovery and the development of a strong sense of national identity with which a majority of the public positively identified. And whereas GDR identity was defined by the SED in historical, traditional, and antifascist terms, in the Federal Republic national identity developed out of a discourse around the “new” and around technological, industrial, and economic advancement. These ideas were often expressed visually through the CIAM-defined modern aesthetic and its appearance in cultural exhibitions and advertising campaigns. These campaigns emphasized the leisure, elegance, and individual affluence that, it was implicitly argued, characterized West Germany and western Berlin. This vision of the present (and future) democratic, capitalist Germany was staged in a number of exhibitions in western Berlin throughout the 1950s. The most significant of these for   M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  47

a discussion of architecture in divided Berlin was the 1957 International Building Exhibition, or Interbau, which celebrated the reconstruction of western Berlin’s Hansa district. The largely congenial relationship between the western Allied forces and authorities in western Berlin greatly facilitated reconstruction efforts and was also a factor in the positive public response to the resulting urban landscape. The United States in particular provided an external prototype for the political and economic organization of the Federal Republic when it was founded in 1949, as well as a cultural model that was widely and popularly admired. The US government also provided material and moral support that contributed to the remarkable resurgence of the Federal Republic’s economy and benefited western Berlin both materially and symbolically. Partly as a result, the reconstruction of western Berlin occurred more quickly and on a larger scale in comparison with that of eastern Berlin. An account of Interbau thus begins with an overview of the US effort at “reeducation” and reconstruction in West Germany as a whole. Although the western Allied forces had, like the Soviet Union, initially planned to dismantle the German economy, it was ultimately decided that the reconstruction effort in the western zones, led by the United States, would focus on both physical and economic reconstruction. The creation of a prosperous, capitalist West Germany would help in achieving “denazification” as well. A stable society would enhance the occupiers’ effort to “rehabilitate” the Germany psyche, which was said to suffer from a pathological need to submit to dominant authority figures. The goal of what US occupation forces called “reeducation” was to eliminate any remaining traces of Nazi tendencies in German society and to fundamentally change the German national character by encouraging Germans to adopt capitalist and democratic institutions, as well as “the mentality of political fair play and economic cooperation.”82 To do this, the US government looked to the fields of psychology and sociology for theories that could explain and cure what was diagnosed as Germany’s “group paranoia.” The focus on reeducation meant that the western Allies’ attempts to reconstruct Germany, literally and figuratively, were generally less punitive as compared with those employed in the eastern zone. The overall focus was on starting over at the so-called zero hour (Stunde null) and establishing a stable and viable Germany, rather than on hobbling the German economy or implementing the unpopular measures associated with denazification.83 Once the Federal Republic was established, its government, under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, likewise chose to avoid direct confrontation with the country’s Nazi legacy, focusing instead on less divisive, although related, issues. For example, rather than bring lower-level 48  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

members of Hitler’s regime to justice, Adenauer’s administration worked toward restitution for its victims. The West German government believed this nonconfrontational approach was necessary in order to maintain the country’s fragile political and social stability, which was particularly important in the context of the intensifying Cold War.84 The western Allies’ less aggressive methods with regard to reconstruction resulted in differing attitudes toward occupiers in East versus West Germany. While in the GDR the East German population was loath to identify with the Soviet Union, in the Federal Republic many West Germans eagerly adopted western, specifically American values and modes of consumption. A key factor was that the United States did not suffer the high number of casualties that the Soviet Union did, nor was its economy damaged by the war, meaning both that US soldiers did not generally experience the same impulse to seek revenge against Germans and that the US government was better equipped to provide material support to the Federal Republic. The more positive attitude toward the United States meant that, from 1945, many West Germans actively aligned themselves politically, socially, and culturally with the United States in an attempt to forge a “new” national identity that would excise certain aspects of the country’s shameful past.85 This emulation of American values was encouraged by the Adenauer government, which stressed continuing stability and economic success through “normalization,” framed as a synonym for “Westernization,” and through the Federal Republic’s integration with the United States and Western Europe.86 Most visible was many West Germans’ embrace of US consumer culture in the postwar period, a phenomenon sometimes called “Cocacolonization.”87 The close relationship between the Federal Republic and the United States resulted in part from US efforts to ensure West Germany’s economic independence, most famously through the financial largess of the European Recovery Program (ERP), that is, the Marshall Plan, itself a product of the “reeducation” approach.88 Many West Germans felt grateful toward the United States, a sentiment that fueled the popularity of American culture in the Federal Republic. This appeal was further facilitated by the wide availability of US consumer products, which the United States was able to dump onto the West German market because of the two countries’ economic ties. Within the film industry, for example, there were no quotas limiting the number of US films that could be released in the Federal Republic, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the US Motion Picture Export Association flooded West Germany with its products.89 West (and East) German teenagers flocked to movies like The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1953) and Blackboard Jungle (Richard Brooks, 1955) and left the  M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  49

aters wanting to emulate protagonists’ tastes for blue jeans, leather jackets, and rock ’n’ roll.90 American values remained a key influence on the formation of a unique sense of national identity in western Germany after the occupation period; however, also important in this regard was the notion of a West German economic “miracle.” West Germany’s economic resurgence did not transpire immediately after the war but, once it did take hold, was indeed astonishing in its rapid and sustained growth, particularly considering the extent of the damage from the war. Fueled by a strong currency combined with the advanced technology of the newly rebuilt infrastructure and a steady flow of cheap labor, initially from East Germany, West German gross national product rose at a rate of 7 to 8 percent per year throughout the 1950s. By the decade’s end, the West German export economy rivaled that of the United States, and the country enjoyed near full employment.91 As the West German economy continued to grow throughout the 1950s and 1960s, it became increasingly central to the definition of West German identity. As the historian S. Jonathan Wiesen argues, the narrative of the economic “miracle” amounted to the kind of foundation myth around which national identity is often constructed; indeed, the idea of an economic miracle was established before the material benefits of the improved economy were evident to most West Germans.92 Both the material effects and images of economic prosperity, which prevailed in West German postwar visual culture, would have formed a striking contrast to the deprivation and destitution of the war years. Partly as a result, store shelves were stocked with what seemed to be “miraculous” speed and with consumer goods that promised to make life easier, more comfortable, and more pleasant for every West German. Displays in advertising and at trade fairs encouraged these positive perceptions, presenting images of abundance, such as the modern-styled domestic interior, that stoked West Germans’ pride in what was thought to be their superior ingenuity and ability to produce high-quality goods.93 Consumer products like the Volkswagen Beetle and the kidney-shaped coffee table (Nierentisch) became symbols of the economic miracle.94 Not only did such goods suggest the lifestyle of leisure, comfort, and prosperity that would be made possible by the strong economy, but they were also viewed as markers of the values and ideals represented by the Federal Republic as a whole.95 Indeed, efforts to narrativize and trumpet the West German economic miracle were not only about proving the superiority of the “West” but also about distancing the Federal Republic from its recent past and forging West German solidarity against an enemy that partly comprised former compatriots. A comparison between the Federal Republic’s “miraculous” 50   M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

economic growth and the sluggish rates of that of the GDR seemed only to reinforce the mythical status of the former and, thus, the divide between the two Germanys. The use of economic values and the economic “miracle” to forge national identity in the western areas of Germany was readily apparent in divided Berlin. Berlin’s western zones in particular benefited from the economic and military support of the United States and other western powers and benefited also from the strong West German economy. This support for western Berlin was clearly reflected in the plans for its reconstruction, both materially and symbolically, and is most evident in the reconstructed Hansa district and the exhibition, known as Interbau, that celebrated it. Based on existing plans that were then expanded and made into an exhibition in response to the Stalinallee development, the effort to reconstruct the Hansa district was a tool through which the city’s government was able to align Berlin’s western zones with the United States as well as forge a connection between these zones and the Federal Republic’s economic miracle. As in the GDR, the reconstruction of Germany’s former capital was viewed by political and cultural authorities as an explicitly political act.96 Interbau specifically marked a step toward the country’s (and city’s) eventual reunification and provided proof of the sponsoring governments’ commitment to peace and prosperity. As indicated in the official “Statement of Exhibition Objectives,” Interbau’s “political worth [could] not be overestimated.”97 Furthermore, the architectural exhibition would create buildings that could serve as models, both formally and technically, for construction in other cities, as well as manifest “the technology and design sophistication [Gestaltungskraft] of the free world in the diversity of its forms.”98 It would thus prove the capability of the western powers to reconstruct and reunify Berlin and Germany and to rebuild other cities in Europe outside the Soviet sphere. To this end, Interbau featured finished buildings as well as buildings at various stages of construction so as to foreground “questions of building . . . from design to construction to economics.”99 Interbau would also stand as “an example of international collegial collaboration” and thus provide proof of the solidarity of the nations of the “free world” in their support for western Berlin.100 As such, the buildings constructed in the Hansa district were designed by some of the most prestigious practitioners of the modern style, including Alvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer, and Le Corbusier.101 The ground plan for the Hansa quarter development, designed by Gerhard Jobst and Willy Kreuer, implemented CIAM-inspired modernist principles by including large amounts of open green space, providing large, centrally located roadways for auto traffic, and avoiding any reference to the district’s previous layout (fig. 1.8). The function of the   M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  5 1

Fig. 1.8. scale model of design for Interbau based on the ground plan designed by Gerhard Jobst and Willy Kreuer, 1953. L andesarchiv Berlin / photo: Willy Kiel.

exhibition as a tool of propaganda was explicitly referenced in planning documents, which spoke of its power to “enhance the promotional potential [werbender Kraft] of the still-divided Berlin.”102 Fig 1.8 The choice by its organizers of the particular modern approach for Interbau was not surprising given the associations between this approach, American values, and the radically “new.” The notion that the modern aesthetic was an “international style” helped communicate western Berlin’s broad, global support.103 Moreover, because the Nazis had equated “internationalism” and the related term “cosmopolitanism” with the negative aspects of modernity and urban life, the modern style was useful in juxtaposing western Berlin against the Nazi era. The style furthermore helped to create in western Berlin a simultaneously “new” and “historic” city. The modern style functioned to connect Interbau, and by extension western Berlin, with both the history of modern architecture’s development in Germany prior to World War II and architects’ embrace of the style in the postwar United States, while at the same time eliding the Nazi period. Modernism functioned as a stylistic link between the innovators 5 2  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

of the past and of the present and furthermore suggested an innovative, promising future for western Berlin and the Federal Republic, a future tied economically as well as politically and culturally to the United States.104 The United States was a major presence at Interbau, contributing more than any other country and providing the only nation-sponsored permanent structure, the Berlin Congress Hall (Hugh Stubbins, 1956–57), as well as an apartment building designed by The Architects’ Collaborative (TAC) and its head, Walter Gropius, who had taken a position at Harvard in 1937.105 The United States sponsored a number of exhibitions as well, including a photography exhibit on aspects of American life held in the Congress Hall, and the America Builds exhibit, showcasing American building technologies and presented in the Marshall House, the US exhibition pavilion built at the Radio Tower exhibition grounds.106 As in the case of Stalinallee, such cultural exhibitions, along with Interbau-related trade shows, entertainment venues, and a wide variety of other events and celebrations, were not mere supplements to the permanent structures of Interbau but rather were an integral part of the exhibition as a whole, providing the framework through which visitors were to interpret the rebuilt Hansa district.107 Interbau propaganda linked the present and future Berlin with the CIAM-defined modern style, the West German economic “miracle,” and US political and economic values. However, the approach used to demonstrate these links differed markedly from that employed by the SED in eastern Berlin. As in eastern Berlin, western propaganda focused on the physical act of construction. However, Interbau exhibits suggested that building was a spectacle to be passively, and primarily visually, consumed rather than actively or collectively created. For example, Interbau attendees could visit each building site by taking specially built trams (some pulled by modified Volkswagen Beetles) through the main exhibition area or by taking the funicular railway or “exhibition crane” (Schaukran) over the Hansa district to get a bird’s-eye view of the new construction (fig. 1.9).108 The Hansa district itself was chosen as the focus of the exhibition in part because it was located very near the eastern sector.109 The America Builds exhibition featured models and drawings and attempted to convey the experience of being in and around such buildings. In an area called Skyscraper City, two-story reconstructed sections of the buildings’ façades installed alongside large mirrors created the illusion of the façades’ infinite recession into space. The exhibition’s centerpiece was a 360-degree panorama that provided visitors with the virtual experience of looking off the top of a Manhattan skyscraper, complete with recorded sounds of New York City traffic and flickering lights.   M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  53

Construction was presented not only as spectacle but also as part of an overall lifestyle of prosperity and abundant consumer goods. For example, in addition to publicity related to building materials, advertisements for Coca-Cola, Lux cigarettes, Osram lightbulbs, and a variety other products were displayed throughout Interbau sites, including on trams and refreshment booths outside the new buildings (fig. 1.10). Even display venues without materials that were overt advertisements functioned to promote products and services. The America Builds exhibit was sponsored by the US building industry and featured many of the headquarters of its sponsor companies, such as the Union Carbide Building in New York (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1957–60) and the headquarters building of the Aluminum Company of America in Pittsburgh (Harrison & Abramovitz, 1951– 52). Moreover, the trade fair of which America Builds was a part—the yearly German Industrial Exhibition (renamed the Interbau Industrial Exhibition for 1957)—included displays of building materials and household consumer products that reinforced notions of the endless supply of manufactured goods, as well as the robustness of the West German postwar economy. Interbau is just one example of the kinds of trade fairs and cultural expositions held throughout the early part of the Cold War. Such fairs, especially the yearly German Industrial Exhibition in Berlin, were an important part of establishing the mythology of the West German economic miracle.110 Moreover it was in the displays of such fairs that the connections linking specific kinds of modern design, economic prosperity, and the “American way of life” were established and transmitted. As the architectural historian Greg Castillo has argued, such fairs—in the eastern and western spheres of the Cold War—also transformed “domesticity” into a “weapon,” and in their wake, Cold War successes and failures were measured as much by numbers of television sets sold as by numbers of nuclear warheads produced.111 In addition, these fairs and exhibitions, designed to win over individuals’ “hearts and minds” and encourage support for “western,” especially US, economic and political values, were an extension of the project of psychological reeducation undertaken by the US government as part of the postwar reconstruction effort.112 Acknowledging the connections between postwar exhibitions and reeducation as a strategy of postwar occupation is particularly important because it helps explain and contextualize the particular approach to propaganda employed in Interbau and the events associated with it. USsponsored cultural exhibitions mounted in postwar Europe were one part of a series of “psychological warfare” initiatives undertaken by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. In 1953, President Eisenhower created the United States Information Agency (USIA) to organize and administer such 5 4  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

Fig. 1.9. Visitors to Interbau could view its buildings from the “exhibition cr ane” (Schaukr an). L andesarchiv Berlin / photo: Horst Siegmann.

  55

efforts. Crucial to psychological warfare as practiced by the United States was the avoidance of appearing to propagandize. USIA operatives were to employ tactics that were indirect, for example, and were to refrain from using the word propaganda.113 Eisenhower believed strongly that, for propaganda to be successful, “the hand of the government must be carefully concealed, and, in some cases I should say, wholly eliminated.”114 Eisenhower’s views on the issue reflected the influence of Edward Bernays, who had worked on the Committee on Public Information, a precursor to the USIA, which was formed to drum up American support for World War I.115 A pioneer in the burgeoning fields of advertising and public relations and the author of Propaganda (1928), Bernays advocated the “soft sell” approach to sales and marketing and innovated such tactics as the press release, celebrity endorsement, and “astroturfing.”116 These kinds of public relations and marketing tactics were employed by the USIA throughout Europe during the postwar period, including in the US-sponsored events associated with Interbau, especially the America Builds exhibit, with which the USIA was heavily involved. In part because of the influence of the United States, the rhetorical approach of propaganda employed by authorities in western Berlin differed greatly from that of the SED in eastern Berlin. In press releases or media coverage promoting Interbau, modernist designs were seldom overtly labeled “democratic” or “capitalist.” Instead, these ideologies were referred to obliquely, through a discourse around broadly conceived notions like “freedom” or “humanism” that were linked tacitly to western Berlin. The structures exhibited as part of Interbau were presented as the highest achievements in architecture to that date, as defined through the “neutral” standards of aesthetics and building technology. The America Builds exhibit, for example, touted the advanced level of US construction techniques by highlighting buildings that used “new materials,” “new forms,” and new technologies.117 Hugh Stubbins’s Berlin Congress Hall was praised in an Interbau press release as “a testimony to modern architecture and bold engineering-spirit” and, because of these qualities, was deemed “a symbol of freedom and human dignity.”118 With architecture focused on supposedly objective criteria, the Hansa district, and indeed most buildings with modern architectural design constructed in the western sectors during the Cold War, could be presented as proof that western powers were interested in and able to realize the most scientifically and culturally “advanced” and “efficient” kinds of building; this modern construction, in turn, served as evidence of the western Allies’ superiority to the Soviet Union, the GDR, and the Cold War east. And, while Ulbricht and the SED spent much time denouncing the “West,” com56  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

Fig. 1.10. Visitors to Interbau wait to board a tr am that will take them to the exhibition’s various building sites. Advertisements for Coca-Cola and Osr am light bulbs are visible. L andesarchiv Berlin / photo: Willy Kiel.

parably little time was spent by western critics, journalists, or city leaders in repudiating the “East” or its historicized architecture. When critics did turn their attention eastward, that region’s buildings were deemed “unimaginative,” failures primarily of aesthetics and engineering.119 Although they were acutely interested in East German audiences, western Berlin’s political and cultural leaders, and their allies, appeared to turn their gaze primarily westward, in particular toward the United States, and their backs to the GDR. The indirect approach employed in Interbau propaganda served to distance western Berlin from the SED and GDR, as well as from Germany’s Nazi past. In part because of the association of the word propaganda with the Nazis and Eisenhower’s desire to abandon the term altogether, the term public relations was coined to replace it. The Nazis had also famously deployed cultural production as a tool of explicit political propaganda, one example being the Great German Art and Degenerate Art exhibitions in 1937. Because of this, after the war, politicization of art and the critique of art based on populist, reactionary attitudes were viewed with great suspicion.   M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  57

Figures such as Clement Greenberg, who had authored the influential essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) and, in Germany, Woldemar Klein, founder of the journal Das Kunstwerk (The artwork), helped to create a critical discourse in which art was treated as above and apart from political ideology, national identity, and the social and economic circumstances of its creation. Greenberg argued that avant-garde artists should remove themselves from public life to search for “the absolute.” Avant-garde’s opposite, kitsch, was by contrast the “simulacra of genuine culture” and a “culture of the masses” and, moreover, “merely another of the inexpensive ways in which totalitarian regimes seek to ingratiate themselves with their subjects.”120 Klein likewise advocated a conception of art as what the art historian Sabine Eckmann termed “a timeless aesthetic entity.”121 Interbau, along with many other early Cold War cultural exhibitions held in western Berlin, was an extension of the propagandistic approach pioneered in the United States, and it fit within the western discourse on modernism and the avant-garde. This use of propaganda helped make Interbau extremely successful in establishing not only the legitimacy and prestige of West Berlin but also its public image as a western-oriented city. Photographs of the rebuilt Hansa quarter communicated both a powerful message of renewal and the abandonment of the forms and ideals of the past in favor of a promising and progressive future. This message was a particularly important and central one considering Germany’s recent history and status as world pariah. German visitors to Interbau remarked that the international tenor of the exhibition made them feel as if western Berlin and West Germany were once again accepted and valued members of the world community. As the West German architect and politician Peter Conradi later recalled, “We had the feeling of once again belonging, as if Germans were no longer outcasts, but participants in the creation of a new, improved world.”122 However, the focus on the propagandistic and “promotion potential” of divided Berlin in mounting Interbau perhaps had the effect of sidelining its other aims. As many critics noted, the exhibition for the most part did not achieve its goals of creating a “model solution” to the problems of urban planning and design, nor were the experimental building techniques employed in the construction of the buildings in the Hansa district exportable as “models of modern urban construction.”123 As with Stalinallee, the reason the exhibition fell short of its goals was primarily because construction had proved inordinately expensive. What drove up the exhibition’s price, according to a federal audit, was that construction firms could not use standard materials or techniques since many of the buildings’ designs and plans were unique and untried. This situation was exacerbated by the fact 58  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

that rents for units in Interbau buildings had been subsidized to keep them low, making it difficult to recoup construction costs.124 The press criticized the exhibition in part because it had yielded no workable models for use in other parts of West Germany and also because so much public funding had been diverted to finance Interbau.125 Ultimately, both Interbau and the Stalinallee development were as much public relations efforts as they were attempts to address issues of postwar architecture and urban planning, and, as such, both used methods borrowed from advertising to “brand” East and West Berlin with particular ideologies.126 And, although both achieved only limited success in producing long-term solutions to housing, both made gains in shaping public perceptions of “their” Berlin, although for the SED and Stalinallee these gains were short lived. However, Interbau was a far more successful branding effort than was the Stalinallee project. Its relative success was partly a function of the greater freedoms and material prosperity enjoyed by citizens of Berlin’s western sectors, but it also resulted from a more successful approach to public relations. The vision of the “new Berlin” offered in the city’s western zones was more pleasing and persuasive than that offered in the eastern sector. The use of displays like the 360-degree panorama focused viewers’ attention on the experience of the modernist city of the future, rather than on the economic forces that created it, making the future seem attractive, appealing, and imminent (fig. 1.11). Moreover, because exhibits like America Builds provided glimpses of existing structures and interiors in the United States, the vision of West Berlin presented via Interbau seemed very realizable, even inevitable; all that was required of West Berliners was that they consume the products featured in the exhibits. In contrast, the vision of the GDR presented via the public relations efforts associated with Stalinallee existed only on Stalinallee and necessitated the active involvement, even physical labor and material sacrifice, of GDR citizens for its further realization. Indeed, the extent of the sacrifice required by East Germans had been made terribly clear by the SED’s violent response to the June 1953 uprising. Finally, while the ideologically charged rhetoric in East Germany suggested a preoccupation with the “West,” the “soft sell” tactics employed in western Berlin made its leaders appear unconcerned with and unthreatened by the GDR. Interbau in many ways set the standard for how western Berlin’s political affiliations and urban identity would be communicated via its built environment throughout the period of Berlin’s division. It played a central role in the successful effort to recast western Berlin as a modern, progressive, global urban center tied to the United States and West Germany—all factors essential for persuading the public, in West Germany and abroad,   M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  59

Fig. 1.11. The US exhibit America Builds at the 1957 Interbau Industrial Exhibition featured a reconstructed façade of an American skyscaper, with mirrors above and below to create the illusion of depth and with photogr aphs of offices and workers inside. Source: Visitors’ Reactions to “America Builds”— The U.S. Exhibit at the Berlin Industrial Fair 1957 (USIA, 1957).

that the city warranted further protection and support. The success of the exhibition ensured the continued employment of the strategies that government planners, officials, and propagandists had employed in creating it. By contrast, the ultimate failure of Stalinallee as a public relations effort and the economic problems in the GDR meant that, in East Berlin and East Germany, the SED would have to devise new approaches to architectural propaganda. As a result of 1950s propaganda, cultural production in East and West Berlin was imbued with clear political valuation; government and cultural authorities labeled certain styles and approaches, namely “modernism” or “historicism,” as either “capitalist” or “socialist.” This approach, in turn, began to affect individuals’ experience of German identity, of the East versus West German nation, and of divided Berlin’s role within each. However, the political definitions of styles and national identities were created at a time when the Berlin Question was perceived to be at its tip-

6 0  M oder n C a pita l , Di v i ded C a pita l

ping point and when most assumed the city would not remain divided for very long. After the GDR closed the intra-Berlin border, and in the years that followed, the division appeared increasingly permanent. As a result, the political appeals transmitted via architecture, urban planning, and popular culture became less about answering a Berlin Question of the immediate future and more about establishing the long-term stability of each of the city’s two halves. Although the urban planning schemes, propaganda initiatives, and cultural politics of the 1950s were created by cultural and political officials with a relatively short shelf-life in mind, they became the basis for propaganda and identity in the city for the next thirty years, and beyond.

  M odern C a p ita l , Di v ided C a p ita l  6 1

T WO  A CAP I TAL WITHOUT A COUNTRY Shaping West Berlin’s Image in the Early Cold War CHAPTER 2 In the late 1950s, the debate over the Berlin Question became increasingly contentious, further heightening the political and symbolic import of the divided city and of the efforts to rebuild it. The United States relied increasingly on divided Berlin and its image to define the terms of the Cold War and its own position within it. In the words of US president John F. Kennedy, Berlin was not merely one of many Cold War battles but “the great testing place of Western courage and will, a focal point where our solemn commitments stretching back over the years since 1945, and Soviet ambitions now meet in basic confrontation.”1 In films produced by the United States Information Agency (USIA) and in television programs sponsored by the US State Department and the US military, Berlin’s built environment became an important instrument of these entities’ propaganda efforts, defining both the city itself—what it was and what it meant—and the larger Cold War conflict within western publics’ imaginations. These films and programs, produced for both domestic and international audiences, used the divided city’s built environment to define its urban image. West Berlin appeared bright and prosperous, full of modern steel-andglass high-rises, while East Berlin was depicted as full of empty streets and crumbling, prewar buildings. Such images had the effect of further linking West Berlin with US values and policies and further distancing West Berlin, in the West German public’s imagination, from notions of a West German Heimat. FIG 2.1 While Berlin’s claims to represent German identity had been questioned even before World War II, after the border closure West Berlin authorities viewed West German citizens’ ambivalent attitudes toward the city with greater concern. Not only was West Berlin reliant on the material support of the Federal Republic once it became more isolated and its division more permanent, but its continued existence as a capital-city-inwaiting depended in part on its relevance for national traditions and notions of “Germanness.” In response to the shifting symbolic and representational demands placed on West Berlin during this period, the exclave’s 62 

Fig. 2.1. Hans Scharoun and Edgar Wisniewski, State Libr ary (Sta atsbibliothek zu Berlin Preu ß ischer Kulturbesitz, now known as Haus Potsdamer Str a ß e), 1967–78. Photo: bpk / Berlin / Liselotte and Armin Orgel-Köhne / Art Resource, New York.

sponsoring governments increasingly turned to cultural politics in an effort to craft for the city an image that would distinguish it from East Berlin and demonstrate that West Berlin was the more successful of the two sides of the city. At the same time, these governments would have to communicate to its benefactors that West Berlin remained imperiled and worth defending, partly by virtue of its status as the once and future capital of Germany. The development of the West Berlin Cultural Forum, in particular the Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz; Hans Scharoun and Edgar Wisniewski, 1964–78; fig. 2.1), provides a clear example of how city leaders attempted to adjust West Berlin’s image, as created in the 1950s, to suit its post-wall reality. With the State Library and Cultural Forum, the city’s leaders sought to locate West Berlin’s urban identity within the matrix of western political, economic, and cultural values and the discourse on modern architecture, even as these contexts A C a p ita l w itho ut a Co untry  63

were changing precisely as a result of West Berlin’s post-1961 isolation and special status.

The Berlin Crisis

The erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 is one of the most famous events of the Cold War. Less well known are the complex political dealings that preceded the August 13, 1961, closure of the intra-Berlin border. A brief overview of the events that led to the border closure is crucial for gaining an understanding of the role architecture and the mass media played in the struggle for control over divided Berlin and in defining the Cold War “East” and “West,” particularly for audiences in the Federal Republic, the United States, and other western countries. Acknowledging the complexity of the so-called Berlin Crisis, including the diverse perspectives of the key parties involved, provides important context for examining the efforts of government officials and propagandists to frame the conflict as a very simplistic struggle of “good” versus “evil” and capitalism versus socialism/ communism.2 Furthermore, an understanding of the political context in which the Berlin Crisis unfolded makes more obvious the biases apparent in the propaganda discussed below, highlighting the extent to which films and news reports were actively constructed narratives, rather than objective reports. The 1961 border closure brought to a head the ongoing postwar debate between the eastern and western Allied powers over the rights of access to divided Berlin and its political status. Although the division of Germany had been formalized in 1949, it was assumed that Berlin’s division and ambiguous political status could not be maintained. Throughout the 1950s, many thought that the so-called Berlin Question would soon be resolved for better or worse, once the eastern and western Cold War powers agreed on what form this resolution would take. The United States and its allies, which from 1949 were united as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), considered Berlin a “superdomino,” crucial to maintaining control not just of Germany but also Western Europe as a whole.3 The NATO powers, especially the United States, therefore insisted on their own continued military presence in West Berlin. Although the establishment of East and West Germany might seem to nullify the 1945 Yalta agreement, NATO claimed continued jurisdiction in Berlin’s western sectors by maintaining that postwar treaties were still valid. Until new treaties were signed, western allies argued, Berlin remained under “four-power status.” It might seem self-evident that the western powers would continue to defend the western portion of the city, 64  A C a pita l w itho ut a C o untry

despite its location within East Germany. The western allies’ insistence on the right of access to and province over the city’s western sectors is certainly justifiable; however, so too, arguably, is the counterargument of Soviet and East German officials that the creation of East and West Germany had rendered earlier postwar treaties null and void. Regardless, and despite their divergent views on the issue, both the eastern and western Cold War powers wanted to resolve the Berlin Question without resorting to armed conflict. However, at the same time, each side was convinced the other was bent on attack and conquest.4 In addition, both the Soviet Union and the United States were anxious to avoid exhibiting any signs of weakness, particularly in Berlin. Essentially, the position of each side mirrored the other. While to the western powers the Soviet Union was the instigator of the crisis, Khrushchev saw his actions as primarily defensive, an attempt to counter what he and others in the Eastern Bloc considered the more aggressive act: the occupation of West Berlin. Khrushchev hoped to broker a diplomatic resolution to the Berlin Question, declaring that he wanted to “normalize” the situation in the city.5 On the western side, Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, from 1953 to 1960, and then John F. Kennedy, from 1961, likewise thought of the United States as the defensive party. Kennedy in particular insisted that the crisis was “manufactured” by Khrushchev, and he took a somewhat more hard-line stance than his predecessor had. The Kennedy administration vowed, as part of the so-called Acheson Plan, to stand firm in Berlin, supporting the city through a buildup of military forces and conventional weapons while simultaneously working toward a diplomatic solution.6 Not only did the United States and Soviet Union have divergent opinions on the proper resolution to the Berlin Question, but even the representatives of the various NATO and Warsaw Pact countries each had their own views on how best to resolve the dilemma.7 As the historian Hope Harrison clearly shows in Driving the Soviets Up the Wall, the GDR was far from a puppet regime. On the contrary, the SED routinely leveraged the GDR’s strategic position in an attempt to get what it wanted from the Soviet Union. With regard to the Berlin Question, Walter Ulbricht refused to yield to western pressure on the issue and complained of Khrushchev’s “unnecessary tolerance” of the western allies’ presence in Berlin. Ulbricht furthermore resisted Khrushchev’s pleas of economic and political reforms as a means of achieving stability in the country and quieting dissent.8 In the Federal Republic, Chancellor Adenauer did not believe that US policies went far enough in rebuffing the Soviet Union. Moreover, he thought the Acheson Plan sent mixed signals. French leader Charles de Gaulle agreed.9 The British government, led by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, was far A C a p ita l w itho ut a Co untry  65

less willing to risk nuclear war over western Berlin than the other NATO allies and pushed for compromise with the Soviet Union.10 The conflict over the Berlin Question was not simply two-sided. Moreover, although western allies were convinced otherwise, it is not at all clear that the Soviet Union would have invaded western Berlin.11 As Harrison argues, Khrushchev’s prime motivation was the hope that, in order to protect access to West Berlin, western powers would be forced to recognize and negotiate with the GDR and thus open East Germany up to the rest of the world, despite West Germany’s Hallstein Doctrine.12 This doctrine, which guided the Federal Republic’s foreign policy from 1955, stipulated that the Federal Republic would cut off diplomatic relations with any country that recognized the GDR. The implication was that there was only one “true” Germany and that, consequently, other countries would have to choose between having diplomatic relations with one Germany or the other; they could not have both. Largely because of the Federal Republic’s economic success, most countries that were not already members of NATO or the Warsaw Pact chose to recognize West rather than East Germany. As a result, the Hallstein Doctrine was generally very effective in isolating the GDR, politically as well as economically, throughout the 1950s and early 1960s.13 By the summer of 1961, the ever-growing tide of East German emigration and the increasingly faltering GDR economy heightened Khrushchev’s and Ulbricht’s feelings of urgency regarding the Berlin Question. However, Kennedy’s refusal to concede to Khrushchev’s demands at a conference in Vienna in June 1961 led to an impasse. In the meantime, leaders in the GDR had been for several years advocating border closure as the solution to the problem. Although the Soviet Union had initially resisted this approach as too drastic and sure to garner public protest, undermining what little legitimacy the GDR regime enjoyed, Khrushchev reluctantly agreed to support the SED’s plan in July 1961.14 In the early morning hours of Sunday, August 13, the GDR closed the east-west border within Berlin and began building a wall shortly thereafter. The closing of the border and the construction of the Berlin Wall seemed at the time like a heightening of tensions between the east and west, particularly in October 1962, when Soviet and US tanks faced off at Checkpoint Charlie over a dispute regarding travel restrictions. In fact, the events of 1961–62 would prove to be the beginning of a period of détente.15 The outcome of the Berlin Crisis could hardly be deemed an unqualified success for the Kennedy administration, at least not initially. The western Cold War powers as a whole had done very little in response to the border closure in the days and months after August 13, which surprised many 6 6  A C a pita l w itho ut a C o untry

people, given Kennedy’s strong words of support for West Berlin earlier in the summer. The frustration of West Berliners in particular was reflected in the August 16 headline of the Bild newspaper: “Der Westen tut nichts!” (The west does nothing!).16 In addition, the administration’s Berlin policy had been largely predicated on an attempt by the Soviet Union to shut down access to West Berlin that never transpired. Finally, the US stance on Berlin had run counter to the policy positions of some of its NATO allies. Within the State Department there was clear concern that the events surrounding border closure had revealed the United States and NATO to be weak and ineffectual. On August 18, 1961, for example, the USIA official Burnett Anderson advised Donald M. Wilson, the deputy director, that “the restrained response of the Western powers to the recent closing of the Berlin border may seriously jeopardize our psychological position with regard to Berlin.”17 In October 1961, Jim O’Donnell, journalist and advisor to the Kennedy administration on Berlin, wrote to the USIA deputy director for policy and plans, Thomas Sorensen, who was on his way to Berlin. In his letter, O’Donnell warned Sorensen that upon his arrival he might hear talk of “John Flinch Kennedy.” He also told Sorensen that some of the actions of the United States after the border closure had sent the message that “the normal channels had goofed, or were sluggish and inefficient on August 13th, which was damned well true.”18 Such concerns about the perception of the US government were by no means trivial. The success of the United States in the Cold War, a struggle Kennedy called in May 1961 “a battle for minds and souls as well as lives and territory,” depended in part on the American government’s ability to manage the global public’s perception of its policies and actions.19 While the American response to the border closure in Berlin garnered heavy criticism overseas, within the United States there was very broad popular support for “standing strong” in Berlin, which was undaunted by the events of August 13. Indeed, according to Gallup polls, the US population’s willingness to go to war to defend West Berlin actually rose between September and October 1961.20 As the historian Andreas Daum argues, in the postwar period the city became “America’s Berlin,” a phrase he describes as “the most succinct way to state that the relationship between West Berlin and the United States during the Cold War intensified and became a close cultural and emotional bond.”21 Both the doubts abroad and the fervent domestic support for US actions in Berlin led the government to focus its public relations and propaganda more and more on the divided city.22 The broad support for West Berlin within the United States meant that the conflict over divided Berlin, and Kennedy’s defense of West Berlin, could be used to promote the US government’s foreign policy initiatives A C a p ita l w itho ut a Co untry  67

elsewhere. Internationally, the USIA used Berlin and the Berlin Crisis as a wedge issue in an effort to coerce foreign governments onto the western side in the Cold War. Beginning early in 1961, USIA officials in cities all over the world, such as Ankara, Montevideo, Katmandu, Stockholm, and New Delhi, wired Washington with guidance on how to frame the situation for local populations in order to whip up support for NATO. This effort was particularly important because, as several officials reported, many government officials in those areas only “vaguely understood” the “complex issues involved” in Berlin and/or viewed the conflict primarily as a “quarrel between Russians and Americans.”23 The USIA’s and other US propaganda agencies’ efforts continued into the early 1960s, and the Berlin Wall remained an important instrument of western propaganda throughout its existence. The Berlin Question was not decided immediately or definitively in August 1961. Rather, a somewhat unexpected, middle position was adopted, one initiated by the Soviet Union and the GDR and implicitly agreed to by the western Cold War powers: Berlin would remain divided, at least for the foreseeable future. Kennedy’s June 1963 visit to the city, which culminated in his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in front of the Schöneberg city hall, marked the high point of Berlin’s visibility in the western media during the early Cold War. The speech also confirmed West Berlin’s status as a microcosm of the Cold War west, reflected in Kennedy’s assertion that “all free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.”24 From the mid-1960s, following East-West German rapprochement and rising tensions in other parts of the world, particularly Southeast Asia, divided Berlin commanded less and less of the international media spotlight, although its symbolic significance only grew in importance in the western sphere of the Cold War. In many ways, the 1961 border closure did little to change the symbolic, political, or material status of divided Berlin. Even the official western position on Berlin remained unchanged despite the wall. Throughout the crisis, the United States had argued that the division of Berlin was the fault of the east alone. The division was furthermore presented as a perversion of the city’s development, a break in its historical continuity that could be repaired only with the restoration of Berlin as the capital of a united Germany. This diplomatic stance was, however, originally formulated with the assumption that the fate of Berlin as a whole was soon to be decided. August 13, 1961, had shown that the eastern powers were not as keen on invasion as the United States and its allies had thought. Moreover, by the mid-1960s, it appeared as though Berlin’s division would remain in place. Nonetheless, even after 1961, the governments of the United States and the 68  A C a pita l w itho ut a C o untry

Federal Republic continued to argue that this division was ultimately temporary and that its wait to reclaim its position as the capital of Germany was not over, merely deferred. In addition, the western allies maintained the relevance of Berlin’s four-power status, although many thought it had been nullified by the border closure.25 After 1961, Bonn remained West Germany’s “provisional” capital and West Berlin remained both a city occupied by foreign powers and a capital-in-waiting. Thus, while US support for West Berlin helped to ensure its continued survival after the border closure, it also complicated its relationship to the Federal Republic. The lack of a definitive resolution to the Berlin Question meant that the city would have to remain a separate entity from the Federal Republic, both literally and figuratively. From the 1950s through the mid1960s, West Berlin’s urban identity was perceived as distant and distinct from West German identity and was instead linked more closely with the United States: “America’s Berlin.” This situation is clearly evident when one compares the development of national identity in the Federal Republic, especially in Heimat films of the 1950s, with concurrent depictions of West Berlin in US propaganda and news media through the early 1960s. Tracing the formation of West Berlin’s identity in this period as an autonomous city and the capital of the Cold War west provides a context for understanding the goals and motivations of the city’s cultural leaders as they planned and executed building projects like the State Library after 1961.

West Berlin and West German Heimat

While Heimat had been invoked in a number of different contexts in Germany, in the post–World War II period the concept is perhaps most associated with the resurgence of the Heimat film in both the GDR and Federal Republic. The genre first became popular in the 1910s and 1920s, although the term “Heimat film” was not coined until the 1930s. These films, examples of which include Wenn die Heimat ruft (When the homeland calls, 1915) and Die Geier Wally (Wally of the vultures, 1921), are defined in part by narrative and visual conventions, including the use of rural landscapes, traditional dress (Trachten), and folk songs.26 As part of a shared national tradition that could express both regional and national identities, the Heimat film became a crucial, early means of differentiating between the two “Germanys” after 1945 and, as such, were an extension of the spatialization of political identity that had begun along the Stalinallee and in the Hansa district. In Berlin, however, the city’s prewar reputation as eminently “modern” had already alienated it from notions of Heimat; Heimat is specifically defined as “away from Berlin” (los von Berlin) in at least one prewar source.27 A C a p ita l w itho ut a Co untry  69

Comparing depictions of West German Heimat with those of “America’s Berlin” can thus provide insight into the complex role the divided city played within still-developing notions of West German national identity. Heimat films produced in West Germany, such as Schwarzwaldmädel (Black Forest maiden, 1950), Grün ist die Heide (Green is the heath, 1951), Heimatglocken (Homeland bells, 1952), and Wenn die Heide blüht (When the heath blooms, 1960), were box office successes despite continued US domination of the West German film market in the 1950s. In fact, the producers gave their films titles that would advertise their “Germanness,” a way of differentiating the films in the Hollywood-saturated marketplace.28 These films helped define West German Heimat as connected to the economic “miracle” but also located it in the former western zones of occupation, in lush, pastoral landscapes such as the Lüneburg Heath in Lower Saxony and the Alps in Bavaria. As the film historian Johannes von Moltke argues, while these films may have been kitschy, escapist fantasies, they also encouraged West Germans to embrace the profound social and cultural changes of the era by offering images in which prewar tradition and postwar notions of progress and modernity were integrated.29 To cite just one of von Moltke’s examples, Die Landärztin (The country doctor, 1958) links the new West Germany of the economic “miracle” with the Germany of the past through the image of a Volkswagen Beetle in a Bavarian landscape. The film opens with an image of Petra, the titular doctor, riding her scooter through the Alps but soon encountering an obstacle in the form of a VW convertible, which turns out to belong to a former classmate, Dr. Friebe. The film closes on Petra and Dr. Rinner, with whom she has begun a romance, driving off into the sunset in his VW Beetle convertible.30 The Country Doctor, together with so many other 1950s Heimat films, provided audiences with images like these, which located notions of affluence, mobility, and modernity within specific West German places. This process, by which the “modern” was naturalized through its appearance with more traditional themes and forms, was also evident in postwar exhibition showrooms. In the model dwellings created for exhibitions such as those associated with Interbau, idealized, nuclear “families” (actually hired models and actors) representing traditional middle-class values performed typical domestic routines in interiors filled with specific types of modern furniture and mechanized appliances.31 Both Heimat films and the modern, model interior emphasized the visual and the aesthetic, presenting political and economic ideologies as spectacles to be visually consumed by films’ and exhibits’ audiences. They were also designed to make the space of Heimat, like the faux domestic spaces at Interbau, an aesthetically pleasing and desirable place to be (or go).32 70  A C a pita l w itho ut a C o untry

However, also like the filmic vision of Heimat, the image presented in such cultural exhibitions did not reflect the lived experience of most West Germans. Films like Green Is the Heath and When the Heath Blooms presented a Heimat that was fictitious and designed for urban audiences, operating, according to von Moltke, “only as a myth in the rearview mirror of modernity.”33 Similarly, visitors to Interbau and similar exhibitions were presented with gleaming, modern interiors in steel-and-glass buildings despite the fact that the majority of structures erected after the war were built with a focus on practicality rather than aesthetics. Stridently modern-styled buildings in the Federal Republic were a relative rarity.34 Most West Germans probably did not come home to kidney-shaped coffee tables, VW Beetles, or Eames chairs either. Until the late 1950s, the majority of consumers spent their money on basic necessities, not consumer products and services. Indeed, in some cases, the products featured in the exhibitions were not available for sale in West Berlin or anywhere else in West Germany.35 And despite a discourse around the “new city,” urban planners based schemes for the reconstruction of cities like Cologne and Düsseldorf on designs drawn up before the war.36 Ultimately, the modernist vision presented in trade fair showrooms was more an idea of the present and future (West) Germany than it was a reflection of what the built environment of the reconstructed Federal Republic would or did look like; it was representation and myth as much as reality. Nonetheless, in West Berlin this representation of a gleaming, modernist future was more of a reality in comparison with cities in West Germany. In the 1950s, because of the city’s open border, the continuing debate over Berlin’s political status, and western Berlin’s symbolic significance as the “show window of the West,” the occupation forces and the city’s leaders deemed it crucial that the vision of a prosperous and modern Berlin be as much a reality as possible. As Mayor Ernst Reuter declared in 1949, the city “must become a showcase of freedom—and also a showcase of economic prosperity.”37 In addition, Berlin’s status as both the former capital of the Nazi regime and a symbol of the Cold War made these efforts at a modernist, prosperous reality more visible on an international scale. The complete redevelopment of the city’s western zones was motivated not only by these political concerns but also by the abiding desire of many planners to rid the city of what was left of the hated Mietskasernen and to replace the notion of the “Chicago on the Spree” with a more beautiful and beloved urban image. For all of these reasons, West Berlin’s government and cultural leaders had a pronounced desire to construct wholly modern prestige buildings and had access to the financial means required to construct them. Their A C a p ita l w itho ut a Co untry  7 1

Fig. 2.2. Fr anz Heinrich Sobotk a and Gustav Müller, Henry Ford Building, Free University Berlin, 1952–54. Photo: bpk / Berlin / Art Resource, New York.

goals and their resources were clearly evident in Interbau, and in several projects that preceded and followed the 1957 exhibition. For example, the United States supplied funds for the construction of the buildings for the US-sponsored Free University, including the Henry Ford Building (Franz Heinrich Sobotka and Gustav Müller, 1952–54; fig. 2.2) and the university cafeteria (Hermann Fehling, Peter Pfankuch, and Daniel Gogel, 1952), as well as for the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek, or America Memorial Library (Gerhard Jobst, Willy Kreuer, Fritz Bornemann, and Hartmut Wille, 1952–54). The area around Berlin’s Zoo Station and the Kurfürstendamm, known as the “Ku’damm,” became the site of new and newly rebuilt entertainment and leisure facilities. This area had a prewar reputation as a center of urbane, modern culture; in the 1920s, it was referred to as the “new west.”38 That popular distinction persisted into the 1950s and 1960s, as structures like the Zentrum am Zoo, or Zoo Center (Paul Schwebes and Hans Schoszberger, 1955–57), an office and shopping complex near Berlin’s Zoo Station; the Berlin Hilton (Pereira & Luckmann, 1957–58); and the Europa Center (Helmut Hentrich and Hubert Petschnigg, 1963–65) were built

7 2  A C a pita l w itho ut a C o untry

Fig. 2.3. Ernst-Reuter-Platz, 1968. L andesarchiv Berlin / photo: Horst Siegmann.

there. Other new, modernist buildings, including the Telefunken HighRise, also known as the House of Electricity (Paul Schwebes and Hans Schosberger, 1958–60), and the IBM Building (Rolf Gutbrod, 1960–61), were erected at the newly established Ernst-Reuter-Platz, located in Charlottenburg, to the north of the Ku’damm (fig. 2.3).39 Moreover, as Jeffrey Diefendorf argues, unlike Cologne’s or Düsseldorf’s postwar urban plans, western Berlin’s plan was noteworthy in that it was a “radical departure” from those that preceded it.40 As a whole, West Berlin’s cityscape or “urban image” (Stadtbild) was streamlined, sleek, and very inflected by CIAM modernism. Berlin’s earlier reputation as an icon of “modern urbanity” was brought into the postwar period through these buildings. As a result of these construction projects, West Berlin had a more transformed appearance in the postwar period in comparison with other West German cities. This notion was disseminated and reinforced by representations of divided Berlin in the 1950s, especially those produced around the time of the Berlin Crisis. In particular, US propaganda, documentary, and news programs were crucial in defining West Berlin and what it sym-

A C a p ita l w itho ut a Co untry  7 3

bolized within the United States, as well as within the Cold War west as a whole, including the Federal Republic. These programs helped to promote a divided image for Berlin by presenting West and East Berlin as two distinct places representing two opposing worldviews, political ideologies, and economic and social values. The growing prevalence of a divided image for Berlin is particularly apparent when one compares 1950s episodes of the US Army television program The Big Picture (1951–67) with episodes produced just before and after the Berlin Crisis, from 1960 to 1964. In these episodes, one can trace both the evolution of West Berlin’s representation in US-produced mass media and gain insight into the origins of what would become the prevailing narrative of Berlin’s division in the Cold War west through the subsequent decades. FIG 2.4 Berlin and its reconstruction formed an important part of US propaganda from the early 1950s, in, for example, films produced to promote the Marshall Plan, such as City Out of Darkness (1950) and Berliner Luft (Air of freedom, 1951), and in television programs, such as The Big Picture episodes “Soldier in Berlin” (1953–54 season) and “First Sergeant” (1956–57 season). These films and television programs often focused on the huge scale of Berlin’s destruction and the speed with which reconstruction was proceeding in the western zones, contrasting the “new” Berlin of the early 1950s with the ruinous urban landscape of the immediate postwar era.41 For example, both “Soldier in Berlin” and “First Sergeant” present many images of ruined urban monuments in Berlin, such as the half-destroyed Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and the Reichstag (fig. 2.4) as well as the Teufelsberg, a hill in the Grünewald forest constructed from the rubble of destroyed buildings. The partially destroyed Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church located at the north end of the Kurfürstendamm was a particular favorite for conveying the contrast between “old” and “new” Berlin. Views of the ruined church tower ringed by the shops along the Ku’damm were among the most repeated images of western Berlin in mass media during this period (fig. 2.5).42 As the Berlin Crisis heated up in the late 1950s, divided Berlin was featured even more prominently within the media that US propagandists used to define the global spheres of the Cold War. This practice continued even after the 1961 border closure, when Berlin-centered films and programs were produced by government agencies to counter the anxiety following the events of August 13 and to defend the actions of the United States in the Berlin Crisis. The divided city also remained an appealing subject for such programs after 1961 because officials working for the USIA and similar agencies recognized the Berlin Wall as an extremely effective propaganda tool. The Big Picture, for example, featured Berlin or included 74  A C a pita l w itho ut a C o untry

Fig. 2.4. Part of the Soviet Army Memorial and the ruins of the Reichstag, shown in “Soldier in Berlin,” an episode of The Big Picture, a US-made propaganda television progr am that aired during the 1953–54 season. Archive.org, https://archive.org/details/ gov.archives.arc.2569502.

Fig. 2.5. K aiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and the surrounding shopping district, as shown in “The US Army in Berlin: Timetable to Crisis,” an episode of The Big Picture, a series of US Army television progr ams. Archive.org, https://archive.org/details/gov.dod. dimoc.30139.

  75

it prominently in six episodes after 1960, as compared with only two episodes in the 1950s. These six episodes include “The US Army in Berlin, Part 1: Timetable for Crisis” and “The US Army in Berlin, Part 2: Checkpoint Charlie,” both from the 1961–62 season, and “West Berlin Struggle” (also known as “NATO: Background to Berlin”) and “Berlin Duty,” both from the 1964–65 season.43 Not only was Berlin featured more often in programs like The Big Picture after 1961, but the approach to its representation placed greater emphasis on images and narratives of division.