Part I

The world was beautiful. We never thought a single second about the Wall, mines, and barbed wire, although all that was right in front of out noses. For us West Berliners, the "Protective Wall" had become transformed into a piece of furniture, like an old fashioned chest of drawers, an unloved heirloom...Most residents hardly even noticed it.

Thus wrote the journalist Claus Christian Malzahn in his 2009 memoir Über Mauern: Warum das Leben im Schatten des Schutzwalls eine sonnige Sache war. Malzahn was part of the second postwar generation, being born in 1963, and he moved to West Berlin and lived in a flat adjacent to the Wall. Although Malzahn's reminiscences about the Wall are over thirty years after the fact, there were contemporary accounts while the Wall existed that attested to the normalcy of this barrier. While shootings and escape attempts did occur, the Wall did not intrude much on the daily lives of West Berliners. Paradoxically, while the Wall was a reflection of an ever-present reality of life in an urban exclave, it could also be ignored.

While the shootings and other barriers continually shocked global and German public opinion, the use of violence to enforce the Wall obscures one central feature of the "Anti-fascist Protection Barrier": it worked after a fashion. The Wall ended a flood of refugees and seasonal migration from East to West and the violent aspects of enforcing the Wall served as a disincentive for migration. While this violence destroyed a good deal of the eroding credibility of the SED and the Communist system in general, it did solve the problem of East Germans leaving the country. As important as the shootings and escape attempts are in the Wall's public memory, the Wall was quiet the overwhelming majority of the time it existed. While some deaths by escapees like Peter Fechter drew wide media attention and public protests, these shootings were much harder to see from the Western side once the Wall had been completed and its security regimen established. As some escape attempts became more outlandish, such as Heinz Meixner drove a rented sports car under Checkpoint Charlie to get his fiancee and her mother out of East Berlin in 1983, it was easier for West Berliners to conceptualize the Wall as something that existed independently of daily life and routine. Malzahn and other residents likened the Wall to a tourist attraction, with a good deal of justification. Brandt's Ostpolitik and Detente both freed up movement into the city and by the 1970s there were platforms in the West for tourists to gawk at East Berlin and the VoPos guarding the Wall.

The normalization of the Wall might have come as a shock given the prominence of Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in public memory, yet the reality was that the erection of the Wall was the climax of Berlin's importance in the Cold War. The divided city was both a symbol of the Cold War struggle as well as an actual site for competition between the superpowers. The Berlin Airlift and the various Berlin crises of the 1950s and 60s had real and concrete impact on West Berliner's daily lives and inculcated a front-line mentality in many Berliners. Yet once it was clear that the West would not abandon Berlin and that the Wall resolved the salient issue of migration, its importance as a front-line in Cold War politics receded.

Concurrent with this receding importance was a large outflow of industry and businesses within West Berlin during the 1950s and 60s. One other major incentive for residency in West Berlin during the Cold War were the favorable taxes and other economic incentives Bonn doled out to the city. This consisted of a whole panoply of subsidies and tax breaks given to both individuals and businesses. After the erection of the Wall in 1961, Bonn feared that FRG industry businesses would abandon the city and lead to an economic crisis in West Berlin. The Berlin aid package of 1962 allowed for substantial tax breaks to both individuals and corporations such as writing off up to 75 percent of construction costs for new buildings, new rent-controlled housing, up to a 30 percent reduction in income tax. Federal employees in the city enjoyed an additional bonus on the top of their regular salary and the state also underwrote low cost loans for West Berlin for economic investments. West Berliners called these tax breaks the Zitterpraemie (jitters premiums) for living in this urban exclave and they were designed to be a proactive measure to prevent people from migrating out of the city. To that extent, these measures worked, but at considerable cost to the state. But this economic aid did not stem the outflow of industry to West Berlin in the 1960s and 70s and the economy of the city shifted to public services and service industries. By the mid-80s, Bonn directly subsidized much of the city's municipal services and the city cost the FRG around 8 billion DM in tax breaks and other incentives.

The result of this was that the city's demographics shifted quite markedly over the course of the Cold War. One of the curious phenomena was that the city's German population became both older and younger. Many of the upwardly mobile youth of the city's population in the 1950s moved to the more prosperous FRG, leaving an aging German cohort of natives within the city. Meanwhile, FRG youths moved to West Berlin. One of the reasons for living in West Berlin for FRG youth was that residents of West Berlin were exempt from the draft or alternative service. Flights to West Berlin became more common during the highly contentious politics of the 1960s and 70s. The Free University of West Berlin also attracted a number of radical-minded youth, who were disappointed that it fell into the problems typical of a German university (strict hierarchies, overcrowding), but fed into the West Berlin's radical youth culture of this era. West Berlin also became one of the epicenters of the student movement of the late 1960s with figures like Rudi Dutschke gaining prominence in the FRG's New Left. These factors were one of the attractants for FRG youth to live in a divided city. Additionally, the outflow of natives as well as various state subsidies meant that rents in West Berlin were quite cheap. Squatting in vacant buildings was also quite common, but for FRG youth, they could live in far larger spaces for much less than they could in Frankfurt am Main or Hamburg.

West Berlin was not only becoming an older and younger city during the latter Cold War, but also one with a strong non-German minority.One other consequence of the FRG's economic largesse was that it also changed the ethnic make-up of the city. One of the basic problems facing West Berlin's economic development was a shortage of laborers, especially ones that were willing to do the grunge work. This shortage when coupled with the exorbitant costs of Bonn's subsidies and tax breaks made the importation of Gastarbeiter (guest workers) an attractive option. By the late 1970s, West Berlin hosted one of the largest Turkish urban population within Europe, including Turkey. Bonn had intended these workers in the 1960s to only stay for two to three years, but many Gastarbeiter had their work permits extended and took advantage of German residency laws. Relatively isolated areas of West Berlin like Kreuzberg became heavily Turkish because of their cheap housing and soon became known as "Little Istanbul." Other non-German migrants, both legal and illegal, gravitated towards West Berlin in the 1970s and 80s, transforming the West Berlin a multiethnic city.

All of this contributed to West Berlin emerging as one of the epicenters for Germany's alternative cultures. Not coincidentally, West Berlin was one of the foundational areas for the German Greens and other nontraditional ways of life. The cheap rents and cost of living was fertile ground for these type experiments as was the sense that the city was an island cut off from the mainstream of German society. This was one of the reasons why David Bowie chose to reside in the city in the late 1970s; it had a vibrant cultural scene and recording studios, but was cut off from the drug scene that he and Iggy Pop could dry out (as Bowie put it in VH1 Storytellers, we "were a couple of naughty boys who went to Berlin to learn how to be good." ). Other commentators of the West Berlin in the 1970s and 80s also noted that the city lacked some of the normal problems of other large German cities. Major-General Roy Redgrave, the commandant of the British sector between 1975-1978, reported that the city had an "the tranquility of a cul-de-sac" as there were no traffic jams and the hustle and bustle of city life had seemingly passed West Berlin by.