Along with its campaign to isolate East Berlin and neutralize dissent, the Ulbricht regime stepped up its efforts, begun in the 1950s, to wipe out memories of the presocialist past. As far as Berlin’s topography was concerned, this meant replacing some of the city’s most prominent historical landmarks with showpieces of the new, forward-looking era. Having demolished the remains of the Royal Palace in the 1950s, GDR wreckers in 1962 blew up Schinkel’s Bauakademie, another restorable ruin on the old palace square. They replaced this structure, which many considered Schinkel’s masterpiece, with the first of their new governmental buildings, the GDR Foreign Ministry, an eleven-story white slab whose blandness was accentuated by the abstract aluminum sculptures decorating its facade.
The next victim of “socialist renewal” was another historic square, the Alexanderplatz, which in the interwar period had been known for its busy S-Bahn station, warren of small shops, bustling marketplace, enterprising crooks, small-time gamblers, and aggressive prostitutes. In place of such bourgeois “decadence,” the GDR planners decided to erect a monument to socialist functionalism. In 1958, when planning for the Communist square began, Hermann Henselmann, architect of the Stalinallee, proposed as its centerpiece a 320-meter mast, to be called the “Tower of Signals.” This idea was rejected as “Western influenced.” However, four years later, after having abandoned an alternative plan to construct a governmental skyscraper, GDR planners revived the tower idea, and in 1969 the 365-meter Television Tower, East Germany’s tallest structure, opened for business. Known locally as “the giant asparagus,” or “Ulbricht’s last erection,” the tower featured a glass-covered spheroid near the top containing a restaurant offering grand views in all directions. The most interesting view, however, was of the tower itself at sunset, when the tinted glass ball cast a reflection in the shape of a giant cross. For years GDR architects tried in vain to eliminate this bothersome symbol, which in the West was interpreted as the triumph of Christianity over Communist atheism.
Beneath the tower the new “Alex” spread out like an urban desert. Looking lonely and forlorn in this vast paved-over expanse stood the medieval Marienkirche, which Ulbricht was dissuaded from tearing down because of international protest. Between 1962 and 1970 a series of ungainly concrete boxes went up along the edges of the square. First came the thirty-nine-story Hotel Stadt Berlin, the largest hostelry in the GDR. Next to appear was the Warenhaus Centrum, the GDR’s largest department store. With its shoddy goods and near-empty shelves, it was hardly a satisfactory replacement for the old Wertheim store that had once served the area. Other new buildings included the House of Electrical Industry, the House of Health, the Central Administration for Statistics, the House of Publishers, the House of Teachers, and the House of Travel. The education and travel buildings boasted socialist-realist friezes which, according to the government, “match the buildings in size and beauty.”
Ich bin ein Berliner
While the Ulbricht regime was seeking simultaneously to quarantine its capital from unsavory influences and to build it up as a showplace of technical progress, the authorities in West Berlin were scrambling to keep their city alive and open to the outside world. At first it seemed that they would get little support in this endeavor from the government in Bonn. Adenauer himself continued to avoid the city. In campaigning for the Bundestag elections in September 1961 he revealed his distaste for Berlin in his attacks against his SPD challenger, Willy Brandt. He charged that Khrushchev had ordered the erection of the Berlin Wall to generate sympathy for West Berlin and to help Brandt win the election. When the new Deutsche Oper opened in West Berlin, five of Adenauer’s cabinet ministers saw fit to skip the premier, an obvious snub of the city.
Quite independent of snubs from Bonn, the presence of the Wall threatened to throw West Berlin into terminal doom. The city’s senator for popular education ordered the cancellation of the Opera Ball in November 1961 on the grounds that it was “inappropriate to hold an officially sponsored dance-gala at a time when our fellow citizens from the East are risking their lives everyday trying to escape to freedom.” Other municipal politicians protested that this policy made no sense. As one senator argued: “Berlin must become . . . the most beautiful, glittering, and modern city in Germany. That goes also for . . . balls.” A reporter proposed sarcastically: “Let’s also forbid all theater, cinema, sports, and popular dances . . . that’s the perfect way to get people to stay in West Berlin.”
Getting people to stay in West Berlin was indeed a concern, for by the summer of 1962 folks were leaving the city at the rate of about 300 per day. Most were young and highly trained, the kind of people who before the Wall had been fleeing the GDR. Another danger, at least in the eyes of the Bonn government, was that the West Berliners who remained in the city might become so embittered by their lot that they would look to the East for relief. The West might then lose Berlin after all—not to direct East German annexation but to creeping “defeatism” and “neutralism.” As an emergency measure to lift West Berliners’ morale, Adenauer asked President Kennedy to pay a personal visit to the beleaguered city.
Aware that he himself had helped to establish the diplomatic preconditions for the Wall, Kennedy was not anxious to comply with Adenauer’s request. However, steady pressure from the chancellor, combined with entreaties from his own advisers, convinced him to make the trip. On his way to Berlin Kennedy stopped in Bonn to pick up Adenauer, who did not want to be excluded from this occasion despite his distaste for the venue and the prospect of having to share hosting duties with Willy Brandt. It would be the chancellor’s first appearance in West Berlin since the Wall went up.
Kennedy and Adenauer arrived in Berlin on the morning of June 26, 1963. Together with Brandt, they toured the city in an open car. All along the route Berliners cheered and threw flowers. It was not the sour-faced chancellor who was the object of their adoration, nor even Brandt, but the handsome American president. In Brandt’s view the homage to Kennedy “contained an element of gratitude towards a former enemy who was demonstrating to the Germans that the West’s foremost power had made its peace with them—that they had rejoined the family of nations.” Kennedy’s tour, unlike Johnson’s two years before, included stops at the Berlin Wall. Standing on a platform across from the Brandenburg Gate, which the East Germans had obscured from view with red bunting, Kennedy got a good sense of the price that the Berliners were paying for the reduction in East-West tension ushered in by the “solution” he had privately welcomed.
President John F. Kennedy, West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt, and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer during Kennedy’s visit to West Berlin, June 26, 1963
Another huge crowd awaited Kennedy at Schöneberg Rathaus, where he was scheduled to deliver a major address on the status of Berlin. As he stepped to the rostrum—looking, in the words of William Manchester, “handsome, virile, and—yes—Aryan”—a mighty roar went up. Recalling that a few short years ago Germans had swooned before another charismatic leader, Adenauer asked Rusk: “Does this mean that Germany can have another Hitler?” Kennedy was not averse to a little demagoguery, and on this occasion he was determined to hit all the emotional high notes. Focusing on the political symbolism of the Berlin Wall, he intoned:
There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the Free World and the Communist world. Let them come to BERLIN! There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to BERLIN! . . . And there are even a few who say that it’s true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin!”