Another well-publicized trial involved an officer of the East German Border Troops, Karl Bandemer, who commanded the 34th Border Regiment at the time of a particularly brutal murder at the Berlin Wall. According to trial testimony, on February 7, 1966, border guards opened fire on a construction worker named Willi Block as he tried to crawl through a coil of barbed wire. Hearing the shots, Bandemer rushed to the scene and discovered that the fugitive, though not yet wounded, was hopelessly caught in the wire. Rather than ordering his retrieval, Bandemer asked for an automatic pistol and opened fire on Block at a range of twenty meters. At least two border guards also fired. Over seventy rounds were expended, more than enough to dispatch Block. According to one witness, Bandemer bragged after the killing: “It takes the commander to come around to show the boys how these matters are handled.” In his defense, Bandemer claimed that the fatal shots had actually come from the western side of the Wall. Although the court did not buy this, it found the defendant guilty only of second-degree manslaughter, and imposed a sentence of three years’ imprisonment. Bandemer appealed the verdict on grounds of “legal error.” At the time of his appeal—April 1997—only one sentence in the more than fifty cases involving shootings at the Wall had been definitively upheld after the exhaustion of all appeals.
Arrivals and Departures
In the mid-1990s Berlin presented a complicated and contradictory picture. The Wall was down, but the city remained deeply divided. Citizens on either side of the former barrier tended to read different newspapers, listen to different radio stations, even smoke different brands of cigarettes. In the 1995 elections for Berlin’s House of Representatives, the PDS, or ex-Communists, became the strongest party in East Berlin with 38.3 percent of the eastern vote, while winning only 2.1 percent in the west. Great excitement over the town’s new status as capital-elect was tempered by frustration over the inevitable changes that came with reunification and a new political mission. The city’s extensive facelift belied economic stagnation, even decline. Companies and jobs were fleeing Berlin just as new migrants were pouring in from Eastern Europe. The city once again touted its openness and cosmopolitanism, but xenophobia and antiforeigner violence were one the rise. In 1996 the citizens of Brandenburg, reflecting old prejudices against Berlin, voted down an initiative to combine Brandenburg and Berlin into a single state, a measure that Mayor Eberhard Diepgen had claimed was necessary if the eastern region was to hold its own against the more powerful western states. Diepgen and other boosters spoke of Berlin as Europe’s most happening city, but forty years of division and isolation had left a durable legacy of provincialism. Even some locals had to admit that the new Berlin might be more hype than hip. As one cabaret performer put it: “Berlin is like an old woman who dyes her hair and then thinks she is beautiful.”
Prenzlauer Berg, the neighborhood in northeastern Berlin that had housed the most vibrant artistic “scene” in GDR days, developed a larger, trendier scene after the Wall came down. Western punks came over and squatted, while Kreuzberg artists and intellectuals, attracted by “the charm of the derelict,” bought spacious apartments in the district’s rundown but still-intact Wilhelmian-era Mietskaserne. Carpetbagging Wessis, along with a few entrepreneurial Ossis, opened a raft of new cafés and restaurants. The area around Kollwitzplatz was ground zero in this transformation. In the area’s new cafés, which were carefully designed to look like old cafés, young people from all over the world congregated to eat ethnic food, drink overpriced wine and beer, and feel hip.
Many long-term residents were less than pleased by the “discovery” of Prenzlauer Berg. A neighborhood group protested the noisy intrusion of westerners and tourists. Locals spoke of being “forced out” by the newcomers. Dismissing their complaint, one of the café owners said that such malcontents “simply wanted the [Eastern] Zone back.” Another source of grievance was the sudden escalation of rents in many of the housing units. Landlords who had reclaimed properties on the basis of prior ownership, or who had bought their buildings from the Treuhand, were anxious to make these units profitable. Because by law they could not substantially increase the rents paid by long-term tenants unless they made improvements to the dwellings, they did things like install new heating units in order to double the rent. One unscrupulous landlord sought to drive out his tenants out by manipulating the gas line in his building in order to produce small explosions. If a landlord needed assistance in getting rid of low-paying residents, he could call on Entmietungspezialisten (dislodging specialists) to do the job. As one entrepreneur explained: “A building is an economic unit and not a welfare office.”
Pasternak Café in Prenzlauer Berg, 1999
One of the trendiest new cafés in Prenzlauer Berg is called “Pasternak.” Here one can catch a whiff of Russia without the bother, and the danger, of actually going there. Some of the Pasternak patrons are genuine Russians—members of a new Russian colony that had settled in the Spree city in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1995, 12,500 Russians were officially registered in Berlin, with perhaps three times that number present illegally. What was happening in the early 1990s was a smaller version of the huge Russian migration to Berlin in the 1920s. In the post-Wall influx, as in the post-1917 one, Russians made themselves at home by opening restaurants, bars, journals, and art galleries. Expatriates could listen to a Russian-language radio program that kept them abreast of news about their former homeland and the local émigré scene. In 1993 Patriarch Aleksy II, the spiritual leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, celebrated mass in a packed Berlin church. He was the first Orthodox patriarch to set foot on German soil. Russians with more worldly matters on their minds flocked to Gharlottenburg to play and shop, just as they had in the 1920s. A number of boutiques on Fasanenstrasse, along with some appliance stores on Kantstrasse, catered specifically to wealthy Russians. Berliners suspected that the money behind these businesses came from the “Russian Mafia,” which indeed had a strong presence in the city. The social center of the Russian community in post-Wall Charlottenburg was a café called “Hegel,” located on fashionable Savignyplatz. It offered its patrons Slavic folksongs along with the inevitable vodka and borscht. If Pasternak was a piece of the new Berlin, Hegel was a slice of old Russia, a refuge from the rigors of fast-paced metropolitan life. “It’s a different approach to life,” averred the owner. “We drink more vodka, we appreciate music more, and we enjoy life more.”
Many of the Russian New-Berliners were Jews. Berlin, in fact, was once again becoming a favored sanctuary for Russian and other Eastern European Jews who had become fed up with the persistent anti-Semitism in their homelands. By the mid-1990s the city’s Jewish community counted about 10,000, by far the largest in Germany. The religiously inclined among them had four synagogues to choose from, representing the main traditions in Judaism. A Jewish cultural center stood next to the restored “New Synagogue,” whose regilded dome dominated the Oranienburger Strasse on the edge of the old Scheunenviertel. A “Jewish Theater of Berlin” performed regularly (in Russian) at the Jewish Community Center in Fasanenstrasse.