West Berlin

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  West Berlin was an island in the middle of communist East Germany, and for over four decades it defied every logic of geography. About two million people lived inside its borders, making it the largest city in Germany during the Cold War era, yet it had no sovereignty, no voting seats in the national parliament, and could only be reached from the west by a handful of narrow road and rail corridors cutting through hostile territory. Westerners called it an "island of freedom." West Germany called it a "showcase of the West" and subsidized it heavily to make sure it looked the part. The Soviets called it an irritant, a thorn lodged inside the territory they controlled, and in 1948 they tried to squeeze it to death with a land blockade. It survived. And when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, physically sealing the city behind concrete and barbed wire, West Berlin did not collapse. It became something stranger and more contradictory still: a cosmopolitan city where young men fled to avoid the draft, where garbage had to be trucked across the border for disposal in East Germany, and where East German railway workers reported to an employer in a communist state while living in a western city. The questions that West Berlin raises go to the heart of the Cold War itself: How does a city function when it belongs to no country? How do two million people build ordinary lives inside an occupied enclave? And what happens when the wall finally comes down?

• 2. Origins of the Enclave

  ›

  The London Protocol of 1944 and the Potsdam Agreement drew the lines that would define West Berlin for the next four and a half decades. Those agreements divided Germany into four occupation zones and carved Berlin into four sectors, one for each Allied power. The Western Allies were guaranteed three air corridors into their sectors, and the Soviets informally allowed road and rail access too. Everyone understood the arrangement to be temporary; a unified Germany and a unified Berlin were supposed to follow quickly. They did not. As relations between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies collapsed into the Cold War, Berlin split in two. By 1948, East and West Berlin had separate city administrations and separate political trajectories. The Soviets moved first to force the issue. From the 24th of June 1948 to the 12th of May 1949, they imposed a full land blockade on the western sectors, cutting off road and rail supply to roughly two million people. The West responded by flying in food and fuel through the three air corridors. By July 1948, only about 19,000 West Berliners out of nearly two million were buying food in East Berlin; 99 percent chose to endure shorter supplies rather than accept Soviet provisioning. The airlift continued even after the Soviets lifted the blockade on the 12th of May 1949, running until the 30th of September 1949 to build up a reserve the city had named the Senate Reserve. The blockade's failure locked in West Berlin's existence as a separate entity. On the 1st of December 1949, West Berlin's new power station came online, and the city's electricity board declared independence from Eastern supplies, beginning a slow journey toward becoming what engineers would later call an "electricity island" within the wider European grid.

• 3. The Legal Tangle

  ›

  West Berlin's legal status was a knot that lawyers and diplomats never fully untied. On the 23rd of May 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany came into existence, and in theory Article 127 of its Basic Law allowed federal statutes to extend to Greater Berlin within one year. In practice, the occupation of Berlin could end only by a quadripartite agreement among all four powers, so the Basic Law was never fully applicable. On the 4th of August 1950, West Berlin's own House of Representatives passed a new city constitution declaring Berlin a state of the Federal Republic, but the western Allied commanders immediately suspended the key clauses, and those clauses did not become valid law until the 3rd of October 1990, the day of German unification. The result was a city that functioned as a de facto eleventh state of West Germany while being legally neither a state nor a sovereign territory. West Berliners were not eligible to vote in federal elections. Instead, the House of Representatives chose 22 non-voting delegates who attended the Bundestag in Bonn, and the city's Senate sent four non-voting delegates to the Bundesrat. When the first direct elections to the European Parliament were held in 1979, West Berlin's three members were again chosen indirectly by the House of Representatives rather than by the voters themselves. Communist countries referred to West Berlin not as part of West Germany but as an "independent political unit," and on East German maps the city often appeared as a blank monochrome space, sometimes labelled "Westberlin special political area" or overlaid with the letters WB. Male residents of West Berlin were exempt from the Federal Republic's compulsory military service, a rule that would shape the city's culture in ways the drafters of the exemption never intended.

• 4. Crossing the Wall

  ›

  On the 13th of August 1961, the East German government sealed the 46-kilometre sectoral border between East and West Berlin, closing the one route through which more than a hundred thousand East Germans had been escaping to the West every year. All Eastern streets, bridges, paths, windows, doors, gates, and sewers opening toward West Berlin were systematically blocked with walls, concrete barriers, barbed wire, and bars. When construction began after midnight, West Berlin's Governing Mayor Willy Brandt was on a federal election campaign tour in West Germany. He was informed about the Wall when his train arrived in Hanover at 4 a.m. and flew immediately to West Berlin's Tempelhof Central Airport, joining thousands of West Berliners protesting on Potsdamer Platz and at the Brandenburg Gate. On the 14th of August, East Germany closed the checkpoint at the Brandenburg Gate "until further notice," a closure that lasted until the 22nd of December 1989. Eight street checkpoints remained open after the Wall went up, including the crossing at Friedrichstraße that the US military called Checkpoint Charlie. For West Berliners, the Wall initially meant near-total separation from family in East Berlin; not until December 1963 were West Berliners again allowed day visits to the East. During the first of those holiday-season openings, between the 17th of December 1963 and the 5th of January 1964, 1.2 million out of a total 1.9 million West Berliners crossed. East Germany required visitors to exchange a minimum amount of Western Deutsche Marks at a compulsory rate of one to one; by 1989 that minimum had risen to 25 Western Deutsche Marks per visit. A checkpoint at the Tränenpalast, the Palace of Tears, at Berlin Friedrichstraße station opened on the 18th of May 1962 for Easterners bidding farewell to the few permitted to travel west.

• 5. The Counterculture Enclave

  ›

  The military draft exemption that was meant as a practical concession to West Berlin's unusual status became one of the defining facts of the city's character. Young West German men moved to West Berlin specifically to avoid compulsory military service, and their arrival fuelled a counterculture that the city's cosmopolitan reputation rested on for decades. The city was wealthy by German standards, noted for its concentration of education, research, and cultural institutions. Its cosmopolitanism also drew immigrants from much further afield. Active immigration and asylum politics in West Berlin triggered waves of immigration in the 1960s and 1970s that would leave a lasting mark: by 2017, Berlin was home to at least 178,000 Turkish and Turkish-German residents, the largest Turkish community outside Turkey. West Berlin was run from Rathaus Schöneberg by an elected Governing Mayor and Senate, though both had to be approved by the Western Allied commanders-in-chief; their authority derived formally from the occupying powers, not from the ballot box. Social Democrat Willy Brandt, who eventually became West German Chancellor, built his national profile in part through his party list candidacy that West Berliners as West German citizens were entitled to use, even though they could not vote directly in federal elections. On the 26th of June 1963, President Kennedy visited West Berlin, stopped at the Congress Hall near the Brandenburg Gate and at Checkpoint Charlie, and then at the city hall delivered the speech that became famous for the phrase "Ich bin ein Berliner," a declaration of American solidarity with the enclave.

• 6. Infrastructure Across the Divide

  ›

  Keeping two million people alive inside an enclave surrounded by a hostile state required infrastructure arrangements that had no precedent anywhere in the world. West Berlin had its own postal administration, first called Deutsche Post Berlin from 1947 to 1955 and then Deutsche Bundespost Berlin, issuing its own postage stamps until 1990; in practice the postal system was fully integrated with West Germany's. The telephone network carried the international dialling code +49, shared with West Germany, but used the area code 0311, later changed to 030. To reduce eastern wiretapping of calls between West Berlin and the rest of West Germany, microwave radio relay towers were built; the second, in Berlin-Frohnau, was finished on the 16th of May 1980 at a height of 358 metres and was demolished on the 8th of February 2009. The East German state railway, the Deutsche Reichsbahn, operated nearly all rail services inside West Berlin under an arrangement dating to 1945. Its railway police, the Bahnpolizei, were authorised to patrol station premises inside West Berlin. Reichsbahn employees who lived in West Berlin were paid partly in Eastern currency, trained in East Germany, employed under East German labour law, excluded from the Western health insurance system, and treated at a Reichsbahn hospital in West Berlin whose building later became the headquarters of Bombardier Transportation. West Berliners' sewage flowed east through pipes built before the city's division, because the pre-war treatment facilities happened to end up inside East Germany; West Berlin paid in Western Deutsche Marks for the treatment. On the 11th of December 1974, West Berlin's garbage utility company BSR signed a contract with East Germany to dispose of refuse at a dump in Groß-Ziethen, just beside the Wall. On the 2nd of October 1967, West Berlin removed its tram tracks entirely, a deliberate choice to promote car usage, which is why the tram system that exists today runs almost entirely in what was formerly East Berlin.

• 7. The Road to Reunification

  ›

  After the Wall went up, West Berlin's status settled into a grim stasis punctuated by diplomatic effort. The Four Power Agreement on Berlin in September 1971 and the Transit Agreement signed by Egon Bahr from the West and Michael Kohl from the East in December 1971 eased travel and simplified regulations for transit along the autobahn corridors. From the 3rd of October 1972, West Berliners could for the first time apply freely for visas to visit East Germany or East Berlin on any chosen date. On the 9th of November 1989, the Wall opened. West Berlin's Governing Mayor Walter Momper became the first mayor of the unified city in the interim that followed. City-wide elections in December 1990 produced the first all-Berlin mayor, Eberhard Diepgen, a former mayor of West Berlin, who took office in January 1991. On the 3rd of October 1990, Germany was officially reunified, East and West Berlin formally united, and the new city of Berlin joined the enlarged Federal Republic as a city-state modelled on the existing city-states of Bremen and Hamburg. The western Allied occupation of West Berlin, which had begun in 1945 and which no peace treaty had ever formally ended, ceased that same day. The clauses of West Berlin's 1950 constitution that had been suspended by the Allied commanders forty years earlier became valid law at last.