Over the years, Bonn would inspire much derision in its role as capital of a major European nation. In his 1968 spy thriller, A Small Town in Germany, John Le Carré described the new capital as “discreetly temporary in deference to the dream, discreetly permanent in deference to the reality.” A British envoy in the 1960s said that London’s embassy in Bonn was “Her Majesty’s only mission in a cornfield.” Yet with time Bonn caught on with many foreigners, and, more importantly, with many West Germans. After all, the place seemed the perfect capital for a country that was determined not to make waves, not to fall back into the megalomania of the past. Many Germans hoped that Bonn’s lack of a tumultuous past might help the Federal Republic become accepted and even loved. As Adenauer said later: “Bonn didn’t have a history; it was a beginning.”
What did the creation of the “Bonn Republic” mean politically to the inhabitants of West Berlin? Because Berlin as a whole remained under four-power Allied jurisdiction, West Berlin, though claiming status as a “land” of the Federal Republic, was part of the new nation only in a limited fashion. It could send representatives to the Bundestag, but they could not vote in plenary sessions. Federal laws were not automatically applied to West Berlin; they had to be extended to the city by the local House of Representatives and were subject to veto by the Allied commandants. Likewise subject to Allied veto was the promotion of all policemen in the upper ranks. West Berlin was fully integrated into the Federal Republic’s financial and economic system, but the Federal Constitution Court, sitting in Karlsruhe, had no jurisdiction in the city. The Western Allies insisted on these restrictions in order to maintain their own rights in Berlin under the Potsdam Agreement. Thus, not only did the West Berliners no longer reside in the capital of their nation, they were reduced to the status of second-class citizens. Their situation was rendered all the worse by the obvious hostility of the new chancellor, who did not even visit West Berlin until April 1950, when he stayed for a mere forty-eight hours.
The situation for East Berlin was very different. In violation of the Potsdam Agreement, Moscow allowed the new East German government to establish its capital in the Soviet sector of Berlin. In this way the GDR sought to buttress its claim to being the true Germany, the only legitimate Germany. Of course, the Federal Republic made this claim as well, but while its capital was by design provisional, the East German Hauptstadt was supposedly in place for the ages. When all of Germany came under Communist rule, as the GDR rulers promised it soon would, there would be no need for the rulers to pack up and move; they were already home.
To reinforce symbolically their claim to the parts of Berlin that they controlled (eight of the twenty districts that had comprised Greater Berlin), the East Germans renamed a large number of streets and squares according to their own political lights. The old Bülowplatz, which under the Nazis had become Horst-Wessel-Platz, did not regain its original name; rather, it became Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. The Wilhelmstrasse, imperial and Nazi Berlin’s premier political address, became Otto-Grotewohl-Strasse, after the East-SPD leader who helped found the SED. Dorotheenstrasse, a major artery in the East, was rechristened Clara-Zetkin-Strasse. As a symbol of its rejection of German militarism, the GDR rulers expunged the names Hindenburg and Ludendorff from the map of East Berlin, while adding that of Carl von Ossietzky, the editor of the Weltbühne and the 1936 Nobel Peace Prize winner. Staking their claim to parts of the anti-Nazi resistance legacy that they respected, the East Germans renamed Karl-Friedrich-Strasse in the Mitte district Geschwister-Scholl-Strasse in honor of the Munich University students who were executed for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets during the war. As part of the Stalinization of East Berlin, the broad Frankfurter Allee was rechristened Stalinallee and totally rebuilt in monumental fashion (about which more below). The name of Stalin’s German henchman, Ernst Thälmann, was attached to the former Wilhelmplatz. Lothringer Strasse became Wilhelm-Pieck-Strasse in honor of the GDR’s first president. Finally, in a tribute to the founders of the Communist movement, Schlossplatz, the grandest square in the East, and once the center of royal and imperial power, became Marx-Engels-Platz.
The authorities in West Berlin, meanwhile, employed the tactic of name-changing to make some political claims of their own. In June 1949 they renamed the Kronprinzenallee “Clayallee” after the American military governor and hero of the Berlin Airlift. To document their ties to the heritage of Social Democracy, they rechristened Augusta-Viktoria-Platz, in Charlottenburg, Breitscheidplatz, after Rudolf Breitscheid, an SPD leader who was murdered in Buchenwald. In an effort to show that they, too, had claims on the revolution of 1918, the West Berliners renamed the Tirpitzufer in the Tiergarten district Reichspietschufer, after Max Reichspietsch, a sailor who had been court-martialed and executed for staging a hunger strike over unjust treatment of the crews in the imperial navy in 1917. (Later, conservatives on West Berlin’s city council attempted to rid the city of this association, just as they tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent the erection of a monument to Rosa Luxemburg on the Landwehr Canal.) Unlike East Berlin, West Berlin retained the names of many German military leaders, including Hindenburg, Moltke, and Roon.
Monument to Rosa Luxemburg at the Landewehr Canal
As this battle of place-names suggests, the history of Berlin from 1949 on was shaped to a large degree by the competing claims of the two German states. While continuing to worry about West Berlin as a financial drain, the government of the Federal Republic could not turn its back on the city, for it expected (at least in principle) to return there some day, and it hoped to turn this “outpost of freedom” into a living example of Western superiority. The East German government was equally determined to transform East Berlin, which it always referred to as “Berlin—Capital of the GDR,” into a showcase of Communist progress and power.
In the first years of the Federal Republic, West Berlin was anything but a model of economic vitality. Stranded within the new East German state, cut off from its traditional markets and sources of supply, and with many of its enterprises outmaneuvered by more efficient Western firms, the city struggled to compete. While West Germany embarked on its “economic miracle,” West Berlin suffered a miracle in reverse. In 1950 West Berlin factories, which were working only at 40 percent of capacity, exported DM 997 billion worth of goods to West Germany, while the return trade was worth DM 2,239 billion. In that same year West Berlin registered 31.2 percent unemployment, and a full 40 percent of the population drew public relief. Not until 1954 did unemployment levels dip below 20 percent; it took another two years for them to drop to the level of the preblockade period. West Berlin may have been free, but it was also very poor.
If West Berlin was to recover at all, and not, in effect, be a permanent embarrassment to the West, it would need extensive subsidies from Bonn. Given his feelings for Berlin, Adenauer was not likely to be an avid proponent of aid, but he fell under pressure from the Western powers to help. British high commissioner Sir Brian Robertson warned the German government that he would not tolerate “an insufficient engagement of Bonn for Berlin.” In 1950 West Berlin was declared an “emergency area” and granted DM 60 million in assistance. Beginning in 1953, a regular Berlinhilfe (Berlin aid) policy was launched, and two years later various tax breaks and income enhancements were granted to the citizens of the city. Washington earmarked some DM 3,000 million worth of its aid to Germany to West Berlin. Assisted by such measures, West Berliners gradually began to join their countrymen west of the Elbe in prosperity, though their ongoing need for special treatment endowed them with the image of poor cousins living off the largess of their richer relatives.