These lines brought spirited applause, but nothing compared to what came next. On the flight over Kennedy had come up with the idea of equating the civic virtue of modern Berlin with that of ancient Rome. He had asked his aide McGeorge Bundy for a German translation of the key phrase, which he had practiced in Brandt’s office. Now, lifting one hand in the air, he intoned the famous lines: “Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was ‘Civis Romanus sum.’ Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’” (Bundy later realized that Kennedy should have said “Ich bin Berliner,” since “ein Berliner” could mean a doughnut. But given his policy on Berlin, what the President really should have said was “Ich bin ein West Berliner.”) Hearing Kennedy praise their city in their language, the crowd went into ecstasy, screaming for minutes on end. One of Adenauer’s aides later observed that with this one phrase Kennedy had made his audience feel that “he was a great President and friend of the Germans.” More to the point, he had made the Berliners feel important again and proud of themselves.
When Kennedy was assassinated five months later, West Berliners went into deep mourning; his death was felt as profoundly on the Spree as on the Potomac. The square in front of Schöneberg Rathaus, where he had given his historic speech, was renamed “Kennedy-Platz.” Yet the Berliners’ love for Kennedy did not extend in equal measure to later American presidents, who, along with America itself, would soon lose prestige in many (especially younger) Germans’ eyes as a consequence of the war in Vietnam and other actions that cast Washington in the role of world policeman.
Life at the Trough
Kennedy’s Berlin visit, symbolically important as it was, could not alleviate the structural problems threatening West Berlin’s ability to hold its own as the industrialized world’s only walled city. As we have seen, logistical obstacles and political crises had undermined the economic viability of the western sectors of the city since the late 1940s, requiring rescue in the form of state subsidies, foreign aid, and special private investments. In the wake of Khrushchev’s 1958 Berlin ultimatum, Fritz Berg, president of Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie, appealed for an “economic bridge” to West Berlin similar to the “air bridge” of 1948/49. After the Wall went up that bridge seemed more needed than ever. The Wall appeared when West Berlin had finally achieved full employment, so there was now an acute shortage of workers. Moreover, the large industries that had already moved their major operations out of Berlin—companies like Siemens and AEG—were not about to return to a city that was so vulnerable to further pressure from the Soviets. West Berlin’s political vulnerability also made it off-limits for the production of goods of military significance, including the high-tech gadgetry that was becoming the mainstay of the modern economy.
The Adenauer government was not anxious to pump new subsidies into a city identified so closely with the political opposition, but it felt it had to do so under the circumstances. In 1962 a comprehensive support package was approved, including direct subsidies, investment incentives, and tax breaks for companies operating in West Berlin. The package was renewed in subsequent years, and new subsidies were added. To help deal with the shortage of workers, the government imported thousands of foreign laborers, euphemistically called Gastarbeiter (guest workers). To attract native Germans to the city, and to retain those already there, the authorities instituted a host of inducements, including moving subsidies, rent-controlled apartments, automatic pay supplements of 5 percent, and a 30 percent reduction in income taxes. West Berliners called this complex of incentives “our Zitterprämie” (jitters premium)—the bribe they got for taking the risk of living on a tiny island in the big Red sea.
To further assist Berlin, several federal agencies were moved to the city. Their employees received a 17 percent “Berlin supplement” on top of their regular salary. In the 1970s, about 40 percent of the city’s budget was covered by West German taxpayers; by the mid-1980s, that figure had jumped to 55 percent. At that point Bonn was pumping half a billion marks a year to Berlin in direct subsidies, and another 8 billion yearly in tax breaks, business credits, and salary bonuses. Bonn also paid a portion of the costs of keeping Allied troops and their dependents in the city.
The extensive subsidies stabilized the economic situation in West Berlin, but they could not prevent the city from losing ground relative to other parts of the country. Germany’s economic center of gravity shifted more decisively westward and underwent a division of labor: banking was now centered in Frankfurt; heavy industry in Essen and the Ruhr; publishing in Hamburg and Frankfurt; automobile manufacture in Stuttgart and Munich; international commerce in Düsseldorf; moviemaking, arms production, and the high-tech business in Swabia and Bavaria. While the lights of commerce continued to shine in West Berlin after August 1961, their brightness was impressive only when compared to the dim glow on the other side of the Wall.
The barrage of subsidies, moreover, encouraged a “Subventionsmentalität”—a growing sense of entitlement and complacency in the Spree metropolis. Some of the companies that operated there stayed afloat only because of the special support they received. West Berliners who wanted to be where the economic action was continued to abandon the city, leaving behind the less capable and the less ambitious. A city that had once boasted of being faster paced and more dynamic than anywhere else in Germany, if not the world, now took a secret pride in being more relaxed and easygoing than other German cities. Life in the walled island was turning out to be surprisingly gemütlich. Now the major fear was not so much that the Communists might disrupt the tranquillity, but that Bonn might cut off the subsidies on which it depended.
West Berlin’s political class was not known for its stellar talent. True, the city had a tradition of dynamic mayors, like Ernst Reuter and Willy Brandt, but from the mid-1960s on the best politicians, like the best businessmen, tended to move on rather quickly to higher positions in West Germany after having proven themselves in Berlin. Brandt himself of course left to become foreign minister in 1966. Richard von Weizsäcker, who became West Berlin’s mayor in 1981, moved to the federal presidency in 1984. Hans-Jochen Vogel, the SPD’s chancellor candidate in 1983, served briefly as a caretaker mayor in West Berlin in 1981.
Vogel was sent to Berlin by Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to rescue the city for the ruling Social Democrats, who since Brandt’s departure had succeeded in making the town a byword for political incompetence and corruption. With few demands placed on them aside from staying put, West Berlin’s bureaucrats and party hacks got used to doing little real work for their inflated paychecks. When they did stir themselves, it was often to earn additional money in the private sector. Germans call this way of doing things Filz (felt), and though one could find it in every German city (in every city in the world, for that matter), West Berlin had turned it into an art form. Filz-artists were particularly active in the city’s construction industry, whose major companies routinely staffed their boards with municipal politicians. Sometimes, however, the collusion became too intimate even for Berlin. In early 1981 Mayor Dietrich Stobbe (SPD) approved a 115-million-mark loan to a real estate developer named Dieter Garsky for some construction projects that proved fraudulent. The senator for finance, who had also approved the loan, turned out to be on Garsky’s payroll. Stobbe was forced to resign, and Vogel rode in to the rescue. However, neither Vogel nor his successor, Weizsäcker, proved able to root out the deep-seated problems of corruption, feather-bedding, and time-serving mediocrity. West Berlin’s Filz simply could not be transformed into a wholesome broadcloth.