The erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 marked a shift in Berlin's history during the Cold War, even though it was not readily apparent at the time. The Wall would remain one of the symbols of the Cold War and German division, it also was a draconian solution to the problem of GDR migration to the West. Shootings and other detentions were a ever-present realities of life under the Wall in East Berlin, but its erection did mark a period of stabilization for the GDR as the last escape hatch had closed. West Berlin would occasionally be the site of Cold War competition and conflict, but the city's post-Wall experience was nothing like the various Berlin crises of the 1940s and 50s. Life in the divided city went through a very odd and somewhat counter-intuitive trajectory in the near three decades after the Wall's erection.

The Wall preceded a period of conflict and decline for West Berlin. The city always had an element of "Red Berlin" even during the FRG and there was a political culture within West Berlin that embraced various left-wing causes. The Free University of Berlin became one of the incubators for the student protest movement of 1968 and the fact that residency in the city exempted young men from the conscription meant that there was a flight of young Germans to the city in the 1950s and 60s. Protests over the Vietnam War and Bonn's warm relations with less than savory autocratic regimes like the Shah's government in Iran boiled over into riots and other vocal protests. In the meantime, the city's large and vacant urban spaces attracted alternative types and various communes did blossom within West Berlin.

The large vacant buildings were no accident of history. One of the long-term ramifications of German division was West Berlin lost much of its native industrial base and had to be kept afloat by subsidies from Bonn. The city's economy shifted from a prewar industrial city into a service-base sector and the demographics of West Berlin shifted with an growing youth and old-age cohorts, but an comparatively empty middle of adult professionals. One of the reasons for the West Berlin commune life was that rents were not only subsidized, but there were a number of vacant buildings suitable for squatting. Compared to FRG cities like Hamburg or Frankfurt am Main, one could live in a much larger space in West Berlin for considerably less rent.

Yet these shifting demographics did not make for a quiescent city, even after the Vietnam-era protest period had passed. The concrete prefabricated buildings of the 1940s and 50s reconstruction were shoring their age by the mid-1970s and were quite dilapidated. The odd political situation of municipal government was rife with corruption, which in turn allowed for the city's heroin trade to blossom considerably in the 1970s. Christiane F.'s autobiographical novel Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo was a publishing sensation in Germany when it was published in 1979 and soon made into a film, and the author's tale of heroin addiction and fall into prostitution was fodder for FRG cultural conservatives to decry West Berlin's culture of hedonism and Schmutz. The squatters' movement of the 1970s and 80s also added fuel to this fire as public protests devolved into periodic riots. West Berlin had become one of the more public political problems in the 1980s as the Bundestag began to resent sending the city its escalating subsidies while West Berlin seemed to no longer be a truly German city.

While the culture and politics of West Berlin were a contentious matter for FRG domestic politics, East Berlin under the shadow of the Wall appeared comparatively stable and quiet. The Wall's solution to the migration problem was also mixed with a more pragmatic approach to the planned economy by the ruling SED party. The focus on heavy industry of the Aufbau period of the 1950s was deemphasized and there was a greater focus on meeting consumer goods. As this collection of GDR tv commercials shows, this consumerist turn emphasized socialist plenty mixed with older German bourgeois norms of luxury and non-flashy products. Although long waits and shortages remained endemic throughout the lifespan of the GDR, consumer goods like the Trabi car were undeniably more available by the late 1960s and 70s. Goldbroiler restaurants for example, provided modern American-style fried chicken (recreated in this recipe ) and other consumer items that meant daily life finally became more comfortable for East Germans than the prewar 1930s. Additionally, the Vietnam War and the oil shock of the West took some of the allure out of the West's economic miracle when compared to that of the East.

The formalization of East Berlin as the GDR's capital also injected a degree of stability to East Berlin. The city became one of the central bureaucratic hubs of the SED and a number of the state's loyalists came to reside within the city. The Wall itself created a degree of embarrassment for the Worker's and Peasant's paradise, and there was a conscious effort to redress the city's wider image. As with earlier periods, the SED tried to contrast the cultural superiority of socialism to the consumerist and Americanized FRG, so there were lavish subsidies for East Berlin's classical concert halls and playhouses. Rents in East Berlin, like the rest of the GDR, were kept legally low, and although the SED never quite solved its housing shortages, the state did managed to parse out enough resources in the 1960s and 70s to alleviate matters.

Nonetheless, if the surface of the GDR appeared still, there were deep and strong currents lurking underneath. The SED never held much legitimacy for the bulk of the GDR's population, and this led to a very fraught relationship between the SED and the citizenry. The prosperity of the the late 1960s and early 70s was maintained through an often reckless and ultimately self-defeating economic shell-game by the SED. The state balanced foreign loans, sales of Soviet oil during the oil crisis, and a myriad other fiscal balls to keep its fragile economic growth rates. These games did not resolve the inconsistencies of the planned economy and did precious little to arrest internal corruption. The SED's solutions to these dilemmas in the late 1970s often exacerbated the problems of SED society. Various Intershops which sold Western goods or Eastern bloc luxuries for foreign currency emphasized the stratified political system of the SED dictatorship where trusted Party members had access to a life of relative comfort while the rest of the GDR had to scrimp on by and adjust to perennial shortages. One of the nicknames of the East Berlin gated community of Waldsiedlung for the SED elite was Volvograd, which simultaneously mocked the SED's dependence upon the Soviets and their penchant for parading around with Western luxuries. Incompetence like the shortage of coffee in 1977 only made the inequities of an already unfair system more apparent. When the GDR was gearing up to celebrate the 750th anniversary of Berlin, an undertaking that cost a great deal when the GDR economy was in free fall, Western news reports mentioned that many Berliners slashed the tires of Western-made cars in the city, which were often owned by SED elites.

Such events show that while were many East Berliners who were fed up with the system, the city was not the initial epicenter of the protest movements of the 1980s that eventually led to the fall of the Wall. There was a degree of resentment that East Berlin received more attention than other cities or regions of the GDR because of its proximity to SED power. There was vocal grumbling in Leipzig, Dresden and other GDR cities over the attention the younger Berlin had received with some Dresdeners putting "781" stickers on their GDR-produced Wartburgs and Trabants to show a silent protest to the Berlin festivities. The Berlin street protests were relatively late compared to other GDR cities.

One of the ideas banded about by historians of the Wende have noted that while West Germans became culturally Europeans, the closed-off East Germans retained a sense of Germanness. While such ideas can (and sometimes do) go too far there is some validity to them; West Germans could watch Eurovision, vacation in Ibiza and Greece, or listen to David Hasselhoff while the GDR's citizens remained fairly insular behind the Wall. West Berlin's cultural life does show some of this cosmopolitan process in action. The city's alternative culture and communes did have a distinct flavor to them that was a break with tradition. Some of this breakage manifested itself in the Green Party, a political party with an avowedly global orientation, and a number of Greens like Joschka Fischer were veterans of the West Berlin political scene. Graffiti art and other aspects of the West Berlin such as its discotheques also drew in a number of non-German artists like the Italian-born Giorgio Moroder and David Bowie. The latter's Berlin trilogy was a vital part of his discography and the city's culture had an impact on him, as he recalled in a segment of VH1's Storytellers. The technosynth music of West Berlin bands like Tangerine Dream were part of a larger movement in German music that not only had a German audience, but an international one as well. West Berlin in the 1970s and 80s also prefigured what would be an increasing issue in German cities as Berlin's low rents led to the creation of non-German ethnic enclaves within the city such as Turks. The idea of a multiethnic Germany was one that became, and remains, one of the major political issues within German domestic politics.