With generous budgets and no pressure to integrate their work into existing neighborhoods, architects in West Berlin produced some stunning structures, but also much that was hideous. The International Congress Center, completed in the mid-1970s at enormous cost to the taxpayer, fell into the latter category. The architects, Ral Schüler and Ursula Schüler-Wittes, came up with a silver-skinned monstrosity that resembled a jumbo lunch box, or a blown-up version of something a troubled child might have built with his Erector Set.
Of course, no one had to live in this building, which was unfortunately not the case with the two new housing projects constructed in the 1960s and 1970s to accommodate the workers brought in from West Germany. The Gropius-Stadt on the southern edge of the city and the Märkisches Viertel in the north looked as if they had been dropped on the Brandenburg plain by helicopter. Although more solidly built than their East German equivalent in Marzahn, they functioned better as statements of architectural hubris than as lodgings for human beings. Visiting one of these complexes in 1963, the British writer Ian Fleming spoke of a system that “treats the human being as a six-foot cube of flesh and breathing-space and fits him with exquisite economy into steel and concrete cells.” Only in the 1980s, when the city spent additional millions to upgrade these structures and to alter their monolithic appearance, did they become more livable.
The Neue Philharmonie, designed by Hans Scharoun, 1965
While some of West Berlin’s new buildings were aesthetically striking, they could not transform the city into a beautiful or harmonious place; on the contrary, they tended to accentuate its ugliness. Yet this in-your-face disharmony was a source of local pride. Many Berliners were pleased that their city had not been tastefully restored, as had so many other West German cities. As the transplanted West Berliner in Peter Schneider’s The Wall Jumper explains:
I like Berlin, really, for the ways in which it differs from Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich: the leftover ruins in which man-high birches and shrubs have struck root; the bullet holes in the sand-gray, blistered facades; the faded ads, painted on fire walls, which bear witness to cigarette brands and types of schnapps that have long ceased to exist. . . . Berlin traffic lights are smaller, the rooms higher, the elevators older than in West Germany; there are always new cracks in the asphalt, and out of them the past grows luxuriantly.
Some Germans also harbored the conviction that Berlin, the former Nazi capital, had no business being pretty or glamorous. In the 1980s the Munich-based filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta, who shot some of her films in West Berlin, argued that Berlin was the only city in Germany that looked like Germany should look a half-century after Hitler.
The campaign to make West Berlin into a cultural metropolis of international rank involved, in addition to many new buildings, the creation of an array of artistic and intellectual institutes, think tanks, foundations, festivals, exhibitions, and schools. The institutions endowed by Bonn and other benefactors included the Film and Television Academy, the Institute for Educational Research, the Institute for Advanced Study, the International Institute for Music Studies, the Berlin Academy of Art, the Berlin Literary Colloquium, the Berlin Artists’ Program, the Berlin Festival Weeks, and the Berlin Film Festival. Even the Aspen Institute had an outpost in Berlin—on the property where Goebbels’s house had once stood.
The cultural institution that stood out from all the others was the Berlin Philharmonic. The orchestra’s principal conductor was Herbert von Karajan, who succeeded the beloved Furtwängler in 1954 and reigned over the orchestra like a benevolent (and sometimes not so benevolent) dictator for the next thirty years. During this period he raised the ensemble to the pinnacle of the musical world. Although the conductor was pleased to be performing in such a glorious facility as the Neue Philharmonie, he seems to have had little truck with Scharoun’s ideal of an aesthetic sharing between the musicians and their audience. Berliners came to respect von Karajan, but they never loved him the way they had loved Furtwängler. Moreover, as the first jet-set conductor, with posts also in Vienna and Salzburg, Karajan was absent much of the time from Berlin.
Berlin had long been Germany’s theater capital, and West Berlin retained this status inasmuch as it boasted the largest number of theaters and the highest theatrical budget in the country. By the 1980s it harbored one-seventh of all the private stages in the Federal Republic and accounted for one-fourth of the nation’s private theater audience. Yet quantity did not necessarily translate into qualitative dominance. West Germany’s theatrical world was now highly decentralized, and many of the best directors preferred to work in cities like Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart. A notable exception was Peter Stein at the Schaubühne. A kind of Bert Brecht of the West, Stein took over the Schaubühne in 1970 and turned it into Germany’s foremost venue for experimental, socially critical theater. This being Berlin, Stein’s Marxist-oriented theater “collective” had the luxury of biting the hand that generously fed it: 75 percent of its budget came from West German taxpayers. In 1982 the ensemble moved into a state-of-the-art new home amidst the auto showrooms and upmarket boutiques of the Kurfürstendamm.
Herbert von Karajan directs the Berlin Philharmonic, undated photo
Like its dramatists, West Berlin’s novelists and poets had plenty of opportunity to sup at the public trough. The Berlin Senate, with support from Bonn, established the Berlin Literary Colloquium, which awarded grants to local writers. The German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, DAAD) ran a similar operation, the Artists and Writers in Residence Program, for foreign writers who chose to work in West Berlin. According to the French critic François Bondy, such “subsidized internationalism” effectively reconstituted “Berlin’s once spontaneous internationalism.” This is doubtful. West Berlin was neither the magnet for writers from abroad nor the national literary capital that it had once been. All kinds of foreign writers passed through the city, but few stayed for long. Many of Germany’s own literary luminaries, including Heinrich Böll, Martin Walser, Peter Weiss, and Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, lived elsewhere. In 1980, when the leftist publisher Klaus Wagenbach issued an anthology of cutting-edge German prose for use in German schools, only seven of the thirty authors included in the collection resided in West Berlin.
A scene from the Schiller Theater’s production of a musical review based on Hans Fallada’s novel Jeder Stirbt Für Sich Allein (To Each His Own Death), directed by Peter Zadek, 1981
Among the seven, at least for a time, was Günter Grass, postwar Germany’s best-known writer. He chose to live in the walled city because, as he put it, Berliners were “perhaps the only people in Germany to have developed a political sense since the war.” Grass’s own political sense led him to explore the ways in which Nazism had seduced and corrupted the German petite bourgeoisie. However, his most incisive works—The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years—were set not in Berlin but in his native city of Danzig. Only in later works, most notably The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, Local Anaesthetic, and Too Far Afield, did he use his adopted town as the setting for an examination of postwar Germany’s flawed reckoning with the legacy of Nazism and the more recent challenges of Stalinism and terrorism.