Berlin Divided City, 1945-1989

Philip Broadbent, Sabine Hake, Philip Broadbent, Sabine Hake

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781845456573
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Allemagne

A great deal of attention continues to focus on Berlin's cultural and political landscape after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but as yet, no single volume looks at the divided city through an interdisciplinary analysis. This volume examines how the city was conceived, perceived, and represented during the four decades preceding reunification and thereby offers a unique perspective on divided Berlin's identities. German historians, art historians, architectural historians, and literary and cultural studies scholars explore the divisions and antagonisms that defined East and West Berlin; and by tracing the little studied similarities and extensive exchanges that occurred despite the presence of the Berlin Wall, they present an indispensible study on the politics and culture of the Cold War.

PART ONE

Cold War Beginnings

CHAPTER 1

Life Among the Ruins

Sex, Space, and Subculture in Zero Hour Berlin

Jennifer V. Evans

Upon returning to his apartment in the once-tony district of Charlottenburg, British observer Lieutenant Colonel W. Byford-Jones described what he had witnessed in a recent tour of the city center:

I saw the Kurfurstendamm, a miserable colourless heap of ruins … the Dom … its broken ribs spiking the sky … the Tiergarten, littered with wreckage, its elms and firs blasted and shattered, its gardens churned up, its pool grey and smeared with oil. … My room, from which I could look out north, east and west over the grey ruins of the city and watch, among them, the troglodytes creeping over piles of rubble or burrowing their way into cellars, was on the Kurfurstendamm, Berlin’s Piccadilly. … From beneath it, rising on the heat of the day to my bedroom, came a hideous smell of dampness, of charred remains, of thousands of putrefying bodies (Byford-Jones 1947: 19).

With little doubt, area bombing, street fighting, mass rape, and occupation put a violent end to Berlin’s metropolitan trappings. In the central districts, those most heavily affected by the two-year bombing campaign, very little remained of Berlin’s former glory. Over 350 air attacks dropped more than 45,000 tons of explosives on the waiting city. With over 28 square kilometers of its prewar surface area destroyed generating anywhere between 55 and 100 cubic meters of rubble—one-sixth of all the rubble in Germany proper (Fichtner 1977: 5)—Berlin was a debris field, “the greatest pile of rubble” the world had ever seen (Howley 1950: 8). Nightly bombing completely transformed the physical geography of the city, leveling buildings, leaving behind mounds of rebar, concrete, and sand. The hustle and bustle of Potsdamer Platz, once the symbol of the city’s modernity with its automobiles and six-sided traffic light, had been completely devastated, creating a preindustrial steppe inside the city limits that would remain undeveloped until unification (Roth 2003). The Tiergarten’s ponds, lined with sunbathers in seasonable summers, were choked with oil (Byford-Jones 1947: 19); craters and cesspools existed where parkland and canals once beckoned flaneurs in search of urban escape. Of the city’s inhabitable space, a full one-third of all prewar apartment houses lay in tatters with even more tenements damaged beyond repair (Bohleber 1990: 15; Rürup 2005: 59–60).

Berlin had survived the last days, but its infrastructure, its housing, and its spirit were broken. What remained was a shattered cityscape, pockmarked with bullet holes, charred and rotting. To many, like journalist Curt Riess, it was “a dying city” (1952: 72), a veritable necropolis that historians Monica Black and Brian Ladd have described as inhabited by phantoms of the fallen and the felled (Black 2010; Ladd 1998). As Berliners crawled out from their hiding places, emerged from their cellar communities, or returned from the front or exile, they encountered the physical ravages of war everywhere they turned (Mierendorf in Martin and Schoppmann 1996: 139). Seizing on the corrupting influence of the destroyed landscape, police, and city planners, architects, and welfare workers worked quickly to develop strategies to deal with what they saw as “the criminality of the ruins” (von Hentig 1947: 338). The urgency was great as critics feared Germany was not simply a “rubble heap in a material sense but had reached an exceptional low point in a moral sense as well” (Weingartner 1951).

Drawing on strands of research in historical geography, this essay examines the overlapping place of Berlin’s rubblescape as a highly gendered and sexualized contact zone (Bell and Valentine 1995; Hubbard 1998, 2000; Mort and Nead 2000). Relished by teen gangs, frequented by rent boys, and sought out by prostitutes, Berlin’s ruined bunkers and bomb cellars served as emblems of the chaos and lawlessness of defeat. But they also played host to the reflowering of Berlin in terms of irregular sexualities and transgressive identities. In analyzing the shifting meaning of Berlin’s subterranean world, first as a hybrid military and civilian space designed to engender support for the war, then as a site of chaos and disorder, and finally as part of an underground economy of cruising and the sex trade, I will show how the quest to control these sites resulted in multiple struggles and contradictions, shedding light on the role of danger and desire in the process of rebuilding.

Trumpeted as a symbol of the capital’s resistance to its enemies, the 1940–1942 bunker-building campaign had been designed on Hitler’s order to create between seven hundred and one thousand large- and small-scale concrete facilities with sleeping arrangements for over 160,000 Berliners (Arnold et al. 2003: 13). In addition to the over forty large vertical bunkers commissioned in 1942, plans were made to integrate civilians into existing flak towers, build bunkers adjacent to major transit arteries and train stations, and reinforce neighborhood shelters in both the city center and the outlying districts. Rarely was the building of bunkers framed in terms of the state’s moral obligation to protect its civilian population in times of attack. Instead, the bunker building program formed part of a preservationist agenda to rationalize the war effort on the home front. Even in the case of increasing vulnerability, the Nazis construed what was essentially a defensive endeavor as a safeguard for future success and a sign of the regime’s power, organizational acumen, and strength.

The network of dedicated bunkers and shelters were engineered to deliver a sense of refuge from the hail of bombs just as they served to further align essential social services to the Nazi cause. Monitored by undercover Wehrmacht officers working in tandem with the Propaganda Ministry and staffed by party members and Hitler Youth volunteers, the bunkers extended the reach of the state into the nightly rhythms of Berliners at a time when they were most vulnerable. Indeed, many Berliners preferred to leave the confines of their makeshift apartment cellars for the city bunkers. Hildegard Knef, then just a teenager alternating between her grandfather’s cottage in Zossen and her mother’s apartment in Schöneberg, recalled an obvious preference for the safety of the large flak tower at the Zoologischer Garten station over the “wobbly cellar in Nr. 6.” Then just another face in the anxious crowd she made her way to the bunker, pass in hand, and waited for the Hitler Youth detachment to open up the doors (Knef 1971: 34).

As the population of entire city blocks huddled around makeshift stoves and lanterns, they forged subterranean communities, each with their own “quirks and regulations” and rituals of belonging. These coordinated steps, reenacted nightly, communicated a sense of common experience, local identity, and dwelling in these extraordinary times (Seamon 1979). Although the atmosphere in some bunkers could be plagued by nervousness and anxiety, some Berliners recalled with fondness the times spent in the company of select neighbors. Manfred Woge remembered how children seized the opportunity to form playgroups with neighborhood buddies while others forged lasting friendships with the lady across the way (Arnold et al. 2003: 86). They even provided a context for women to imagine their future fate, as people in the final days of the war discussed the propaganda that circulated in escalating tones about the “Mongol” hunger for retribution.

Figure 1.1 During a February 1945 bombing raid in a Berlin air raid shelter. Courtesy of Bildarchiv Preussicher Kulturbesitz/Arthur Grimm.

Soldiers, police, and Hitler Youth led Berliners in orderly fashion to their respective underground cabins. Shelter wardens, usually elderly men or women in uniform, ensured people followed the house rules, including keeping silent and refraining from smoking while spray-painted signs (along with the occasional elbow, groan, or nudge) helped reinforce order and precision. In the larger facilities, select rooms were reserved for the infirm while some were outfitted with electric lighting so people might read or sew (von Kardorff 1962: 95). The goal was to replicate life above ground as accurately as possible. The Charité Hospital had a particularly well-apportioned bunker complete with operating facilities and aftercare chambers, and the national welfare service or NSV maintained a birthing unit in the neighboring Chausseestrasse while many of the larger compounds, like the bunker at the Gesundbrunnen train station, boasted midwifery services. Infants born behind concrete walls received certificates of live birth indicating their first breath was taken “under the protection of the tower in Humboldthain,” as one woman recalled, “in a difficult but grand time” (Arnold et al. 2003: 87).

Indeed, for Berlin youths like Knef, the bunkers could be sites of excitement and adventure, especially when looking back through the lens of memory and recollection. Some Berliners even felt smug in the comfort of their concrete dwelling, like the well-heeled guests in the Hotel Adlon who could savor their cognac under the protection of its famed three-meter-thick concrete wall. Despite the extravagance of the rich, most Berliners languished in what turned out to be less than stellar accommodations, their bedding sullied with flies and bedbugs, rooms overcrowded, short on oxygen and air flow, and infected with hysteria in the final months of the war of Berlin’s pending defeat (McGee 2002: 158). By the spring of 1945, most of the watch staff and Wehrmacht had been rerouted to the defense of the city only to be replaced by ill-prepared Volksturm who manned the flak gunnery, leaving the task of organizing nightly entry to the ad hoc efforts of the civilians (Foedrowitz 1998: 106). The loss of regular housing meant more people competed for long-term shelter in the already overcrowded facilities, and authorities lost all ability to stifle the swell of gossip that had overwhelmed efforts to clamp down on public opinion (Schäfer 1985: 311).

Designed as an emblem of Nazi war preparedness through the regulation of space and emotion, by the end of the war the bunker evolved into a caricature of itself as these same spaces heralded the absolute collapse of state authority. These “catacombs of fear,” designed to embody the principles and ideals of the Männerstaat (masculinist state) were transformed into feminized spaces, inhabited nightly by a hodgepodge of women, the elderly, the underage, and the discarded—those men and boys whom the anonymous diarist of A Woman in Berlin suggests were “unwanted at the front, rejected by the Volkssturm.” The bombast of Nazi Germany—“ruled by men, glorifying the strong man—(was) beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of the ‘Man’” itself (Anonymous 2005: 9–10, 43). Perhaps the bitterest irony of all was the fact that these protective havens turned into the deadliest of sanctuaries given the concentration of people seeking shelter, not to mention the incendiary effect of a Volltreffer (direct hit) and the ubiquitous calls of “Frau komm” (“woman come”) once the Russians arrived.

As “bedrooms, living rooms, and reception rooms for the first to enter Berlin,” the shelters became host to private degradations carried out in plain sight. In the extreme, the wave of rapes that gripped the city transformed the spatial meaning of the bunker from one of protection and community to one of danger and depravity (Menzel 1946: 177). The violence of bodily assault underscored not just the feminization of the space through defeat but also a particular vision of femininity. Some desperate women tried to exert control over their environment by selecting which of their fellow bunker dwellers might placate Russian desires (Schrade 1977). Others attempted to transcend their own sexuality, donning men’s pants and waistcoats and cutting their daughters’ faces while darkening their own with coal. While the raping was often indiscriminate, some accounts suggest the Russians gravitated toward a particular vision of womanhood in choosing, for example, the robust over the skeletal (Ryan 1966: 337). While the very old, the very young, and even the infirm did not always escape unharmed, the bespectacled and mannish lesbian in the shelter managed to avoid their attention, as did some pregnant women. Recasting the space according to a culturally bound sense of sexual preference, the Russians were, in her words, “horribly normal” (Anonymous 2005: 77).

How do Berlin’s cellars, bunkers, and ruins become transformed from places of sexual violence to sites of sexual subversion? Turning to a discussion of the ways in which police and social services regulated sexual delinquency, I will demonstrate how a particular segment of Berlin’s population, street youth, used the opportunities provided by the broken physical landscape to harness the spaces opened up by defeat to suit their own purposes.

While city architects designed plans for Berlin’s future, MPs, criminal police, railroad police, and public health and welfare workers combed through the rubble day and night to provide a sense of order and rule of law. The bombed-out bunker was no longer simply a symbol of Nazi war bluster; it was now a tangible sign of the perceived immorality of victor’s justice and the depths to which Germany had sunk in defeat. In the weeks after capitulation, it began to take on new meaning as well, as a site of communal identity for the legions of children and youths left orphaned, homeless, or in the care of psychically damaged parents. More than a physical shelter for Berlin’s large number of street youth, the bunkers provided emotional relief from the quotidian challenges of life after Hitler with black marketeers, rent boys, and fallen women camping out together in subterranean cliques and gangs.

Just as the rapes solidified in public consciousness the danger and immorality of these underground spaces as sites of racial mixing and bodily assault, the bunkers posed unique challenges to German sensibilities. When in November 1946 Officer Behr of the women’s police detachment was called to investigate the clique that had barricaded itself in an abandoned bunker near the Schlesische station, what she found there flew in the face of German mores on a number of fronts. Six youths, two girls and four boys, ranging in age from eleven to fifteen, had been living in the bunker for the better part of a year (Raid Report, C Rep 303/9 Polizeipräsident in Berlin, Nr. 259. Landesarchiv Berlin, 1947). The youths did not posses proper identification. Without any form of ID, they sidestepped Allied de-Nazification strategies and shirked enrollment in school, two important sites of ideological reorientation for the Americans and Soviets respectively (Blessing 2006). More tangibly, they would be unable to take part in the rebuilding of Berlin through the clearing of rubble or industrial employment. In living beyond the boundaries of the family or the state, these youths created their own nascent community, stealing to survive, prostituting themselves if necessary, and confirming in the minds of police and welfare authorities that the ruins had become a “hotbed of asocial elements.” (Raid Report, C Rep 303/9 Polizeipräsident in Berlin, 1945–48, Nr. 259, 1948).

Living in underground clusters of ten to fifteen, street youth created a world unto their own with their own distinctive hierarchies, ranks, and rules. Although forged out of necessity, when parents could no longer provide for their children, these cliques provided some of their members with a sense of adventure and romanticism, if tempered by the recent experience of war. As one chain-smoking, teenaged “gangster’s moll” remarked to a journalist in the underground hideaway she shared with other street youth, “you know, we haven’t forgotten what the Russians did when they came in” (Riess 1952: 110). Ever mindful of the space’s dark history, one boy reminded the journalist, “For Christ’s sake, where do you think you are? This is Berlin.” What may have seemed like a carefree existence without parental control was not far from Rossellini’s depressing images of abandoned children in Germania Anno Zero; for the legions of youths, many of whom were former members of the Volkssturm and League of German Girls and raised “in a world of slogans, of resounding phrases, of wil...