The writer Uwe Johnson, who moved to West Berlin from East Berlin in 1959, became more strongly identified with the walled city than Grass. His central topic was the psychological impact of the German division, for which Berlin provided an excellent laboratory. Johnson offered no solutions to the problem of division. In his most famous novel, Mutmassungen über Jakob (Speculation about Jakob), an East German writer is killed by a train after visiting his fiancee in the West. Left unclear is whether he committed suicide or was murdered, and from which direction the fatal train came. In an essay entitled “Berliner Stadtbahn,” Johnson captured the growing estrangement between the “two cities of Berlin,” where the inhabitants of each half regarded the other half as more “foreign” than a genuinely foreign country. Never feeling entirely at home in West Berlin (which he always wrote in the East German fashion, “Westberlin”), Johnson abandoned the city in 1974 for self-imposed exile in England. After German reunification, the question arose whether his presence in the once and future capital should be acknowledged with a plaque on his former dwelling in the Stierstrasse. One critic urged that it should, adding: “The city is not so rich [in its recent literary heritage] that it can consign Johnson to oblivion.”
Because Berlin’s once-famed film industry seemed threatened with oblivion, at least in the western part of the city, the Senate created the Berlin Film Academy in 1966. Soon the academy’s students could be seen prowling the city with their super-8 cameras, making movies about whores, junkies, Gastarbeiter, and lonely GIs. Some of these student films were shown at art houses like the Arsenal Kino. As it did with writers, the DAAD financed sojourns for foreign filmmakers in the city. In an effort to compete with Cannes and Venice, the Senate established the Berlin Film Festival. The city’s cultural authorities also transformed UFA’s former post-production facility at Tempelhof into a full-scale studio for the shooting of feature films. By the mid-1980s the Berliner Arbeitskreis Film counted over one hundred active filmmakers. Nonetheless, among West Germany’s most prominent filmmakers—Alexander Kluge, Völker Schlondorff, Margarethe von Trotta, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Edgar Reitz, Werner Herzog, Wolfgang Peterson, and Wim Wenders—only Wenders had his headquarters in West Berlin (and later he moved to Hollywood). On the other hand, with its Wall and highly visible scars of war, the city made a perfect setting for movies, and some of the more notable postwar German films were shot there. They include von Trotta’s Rosa Luxemburg, Fassbinder’s monumental Berlin Alexanderplatz (based on Döblin’s novel), Wim Wenders’s Himmel über Berlin, Herbert Ballmann’s Einmal Ku’Damm und Zurück, Rudolf Thome’s Berlin Chamissoplatz, and Reinhard Hauff’s Der Mann auf der Mauer. While Wenders’s film deals brilliantly with isolation in West Berlin, Hauff’s Mann auf der Mauer, which is based on Peter Schneider’s Der Mauerspinger, features a young man who is trapped in a kind of no-man’s-land between the two halves of Berlin: longing, when living in the East, to escape to the West; nostalgic, once deported over the Wall, for life in the East. Influential as such films undoubtedly were in shaping our image of Germany in the modern era, they could not make up for the fact that, when it came to making movies, Berlin had been surpassed by Munich as West Germany’s new “film capital.”
West Berlin was also distinctly second class in the domains of broadcast and print journalism. West Germany’s national television station, the ZDF, was headquartered in Mainz, not West Berlin. The two federally funded radio stations, Deutschlandfunk and Deutsche Welle, operated out of Cologne. Given Berlin’s former preeminence as a newspaper town, the absence of a paper of national or international importance was striking. None of the daily journals published in West Berlin was on a par with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Munich’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. West Germany’s dominant weekly news magazine, Der Spiegel, was published in Hamburg, as was its most influential weekly paper, Die Zeit. In an era when harboring the principal shapers of mass opinion was crucial to defining a locality’s clout, West Berlin’s lack of a major hand on this lever surely cast doubt on its status as a Weltstadt.
It was not, however, as a would-be world city but as a self-conscious enclave of louche living and neo-Weimar “decadence” that West Berlin exercised its peculiar fascination in the 1970s and 1980s. In a faint echo of the 1920s, the Walled City lured in a small coterie of rebellious foreign artists looking for a life on the margin, on the edge. Punk rockers from Britain and America fetched up in West Berlin because the scene there seemed even grittier and nastier than New York or London, and it had the added frisson of that lovely Wall, the perfect metaphor of dangerous division. Here one could flirt with the ghosts of Goebbels and Hitler and then hop over the border for a little provocative romance with the Commies. “I am waiting for the Communist call,” proclaimed the Sex Pistols’s Johnny Rotten as he strutted about in West Berlin, decked out in black leather and swastika tattoos. Lou Reed came to the city in the early 1970s to find inspiration for his third solo album, Berlin, in which he used images of druggies and derelicts to illustrate his own story of emotional train-wreck. In this record Berlin is a symbol of longing, loss, and stark antinomies, as it was for some of the cabaret artists of the early 1930s. The British punk-crooner David Bowie likewise made the pilgrimage to West Berlin in the 1970s, but in his case he settled in for awhile, consciously emulating Auden and Isherwood. Bowie’s decision to move to Berlin reflected not only his Weimar fixation but a fascination for that ultimate abomination, fascism. He prowled the city in search of Nazi relics, taking particular delight in the ruins of the Gestapo headquarters next to the Wall and in Göring’s former Air Ministry in East Berlin. À la Isherwood, he found dreary digs in a seedy part of town and frequented gay bars like the Nemesis Café, 1970s Berlin’s answer to the Cozy Corner. Accompanied by the American rocker Iggy Pop, who prided himself on being as disgusting off-stage as on, Bowie relentlessly toured the city’s nightclubs, favoring the Roxy and above all the infamous Dschungel (Jungle), where coked-out kids moshed to the throbbing beat of West Berlin’s techno-pop group, Kraftwerk. After their nights on the town the rockers typically took breakfast at Joe’s Beer House on the Kurfüstendamm. Friends of Bowie’s recall him “upchucking in the alley after a gallon of König-Pilsners” and screaming “Go dick yourself” to fans who asked him for an autograph. No doubt Bowie and company would have acted like asses wherever they were at this stage in their lives, but the city of West Berlin, that open-air theater of the grotesque and the forbidden, seems to have brought out the worst in them.
Although Berlin’s chief claim to fame in the Cold War period derived primarily from its brutal division, West Berlin officials downplayed this sad reality in their efforts to market the city to tourists. “Berlin bleibt Berlin” (Berlin remains Berlin) was the word of the day. An opportunity to focus attention on the entire city as a destination of historical and contemporary interest came in 1987 with the observation of the city’s 750th anniversary. Here was a chance to show the world that both parts of the city, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, could work together to celebrate a common heritage. This chance was missed, however, because officials in the East rejected the West’s proposal for a joint commemoration. Instead of cooperation, the anniversary provided yet another occasion on which the two regimes competed for the title of the “true Berlin.”