These measures, really just slaps on the wrist, did nothing to cow the neo-Nazis. Following German unification and the decision to transfer the government to Berlin, the “National Alternative” became bolder than ever. Through Kühnen the group received support from elderly Nazi widows, who saw in these young thugs the advance guard of the Fourth Reich. With their widow-money the boys bought all manner of weaponry, including bazookas, machine guns, and grenades, from Russian soldiers in Berlin. The skins talked of destabilizing the democratic state through dramatic strikes and assassinations. Their hit list included Gregor Gysi, Ignaz Bubis, and even Helmut Kohl. Although these plans never got beyond the talking stage, the skins continued to attack foreigners in the streets. In 1990 they threw Molotov cocktails at a shelter for foreign workers in Lichtenberg. The police intervened only after considerable damage had been done. A few days later the city closed down the shelter.
The skinheads’ brutal attacks on foreigners, and the Kohl government’s inadequate countermeasures, generated a growing crescendo of negative publicity for newly united Germany. By 1992 the government began to take sterner measures, banning neo-Nazi groups and shutting down skinhead squats, including the one in Berlin’s Weitlingstrasse. In the following year Bonn organized a giant rally against antiforeigner violence in Berlin. Some 300,000 citizens joined in this well-meaning demonstration, which took place on the anniversary of Reichskristallnacht. The event, however, turned out to be an embarrassing fiasco, both for Germany and for its future capital. About 300 leftists castigated the assembled dignitaries as “hypocrites” and pelted the main speaker, President Richard von Weizsäcker, with eggs, tomatoes, and paint bombs. When Helmut Kohl joined a march down Unter den Linden, he too was pelted with eggs. The demonstration ended in disarray, with Kohl stalking off in disgust. Commenting on the scene, the New York Times wrote: “[The rioters’] success in disrupting the largest demonstration in Berlin since German unification two years ago added to the growing crisis of confidence in German democratic institutions.” Not surprisingly, this affair was grist in the mill for those many Germans who still regretted the decision to move the capital to the Spree metropolis. It was characteristic of Berlin, they said, that an intended demonstration against the radical right should turn out to be a showcase for the disruptive power of the radical left.
On June 18, 1994, Berlin witnessed another government-sponsored spectacle: a giant parade in honor of the Allied troops, whose departure from the city was scheduled to be completed by September of that year. An estimated 75,000 people watched soldiers from America, Britain, France, and Germany parade down Unter den Linden. Overhead flew a lone DC-3, representing the planes that had participated in the Berlin Airlift forty-six years before. The Russians had asked to be included in this event but were politely told by the German hosts that it would be better if they held their own good-bye ceremonies. The rebuff was hardly surprising, since the Kohl government and most citizens of western Berlin held Moscow responsible for the division of the city. Most eastern Berliners did so as well, and they had never exactly snuggled up to their Russian “protectors.” On the other hand, many Ossis saw this snub of the Russians as yet another blow to their own self-esteem. As one commentator noted: “The residents of the GDR had to suffer a lot more during the division of Germany than [those of the FRG]; now even their conquerors were to get a second-class departure ceremony.”
Although the departure of the Allied powers was another step in Berlin’s return to “normalcy,” and essential to its future role as national capital, many Berliners, especially of the older generation, watched the exodus with a certain sadness. “The Allies came as saviors and stayed on as protectors,” said one seventy-seven-year-old lady. “They liberated us from one dictatorship and saved us from another one,” she added. “Without [the Western Allies],” averred another oldster, “we’d all be Russians now.” Sadder still over the Allied departure were the leaders of the city’s various ethnic communities. As Douglas Jones, a U.S. State Department official, noted: “The withdrawal of Allied forces from Berlin filled ethnic community leaders with dread, because they had come to regard the Allies as protecting powers not from the Russians, but from the Germans.”
The Russians bid their own farewell to Berlin in a ceremony on August 31, 1994. Historians noted that this was the biggest pullout ever by an army that had not been defeated in battle. Yet of course the pullout did signal a defeat of sorts, despite brave words about lasting friendship and future cooperation from Helmut Kohl and Boris Yeltsin. Spectators at the Soviet good-bye parade were few and far between. In addition to their war memorials, which the Germans promised to maintain, the Russians left behind barracks and other housing units stripped of window frames, toilet fixtures, and electrical outlets. They also left a legacy of environmental devastation in the form of toxic dumps and oil-soaked bases.
The final pullout of the Western Allied troops in September 1994, like the big parade in June, was at once festive and elegiac. Tens of thousands of Berliners turned out for countless good-bye parties, and many a tear was shed for the departure of “our good friends.” To keep alive memories of the Allied presence in Berlin, and to educate future generations about the Western powers’ role in the divided city, German officials established an Allied Museum at a former American base. The opening exhibition, entitled “More Than A Suitcase Remains—the Western Powers in Berlin 1944–1994,” featured various objets of the Cold War era: a chunk of an eavesdropping tunnel dug under East Berlin in the 1950s; one of the Hastings cargo planes that flew in supplies in the airlift; a U.S. tank that had stood barrel to barrel with Russian armor when the Wall went up in 1961; and, pièce de résistance, the guards’ hut from Checkpoint Charlie. There were also artifacts of the “abnormal normality” of everyday Allied life in the divided city: uniforms, street signs, Campbell’s soup cans, candy wrappers.
The choice of a former American base for the Allied Museum was appropriate because the American impact on the town was by far the strongest. No major European city had become more Americanized than West Berlin. In addition to vast housing complexes and training facilities, the physical legacy left behind by the Americans included a golf course, yacht club, several schools, officers clubs, and an array of McDonald’s, Burger Kings, bagel shops, rib joints, diners, and other icons of the American Way of Life. For years Berlin had sponsored an annual Deutsch-Amerikanisches Volksfest, which drew in thousands, and it boasted an American-style football team, the Berlin Eagles. Of course, as we have noted, America’s relationship with Berlin over the past half-century had hardly been tension-free. From the mid-1960s through the 1980s West Berlin had witnessed hundreds of anti-American demonstrations, many of them violent. Even the protests, however, were influenced by America’s own counterculture, which provided the template for these actions. As for the new generation of Berliners coming of age in the 1990s, they saw America less as a savior, or as an oppressor, than as a giant pop-culture factory. A sixteen-year-old boy told an American reporter at the opening of the Allied Museum: “Just about everything we have that’s fun comes from the United States. If it weren’t for Americans, we wouldn’t have baseball caps. We wouldn’t have malls or fast-food shops or skateboards. Life just wouldn’t be as good.” Unlike the Russians, the Americans did not bequeath to Berlin a legacy of disemboweled buildings and polluted soil, but they certainly left behind plenty of junk.