Berlin: A capital for capital

Submitted by Anon on 13 January, 1998 - 12:52

Think of Berlin, think of the cold war; the Wall — that physical juncture separating capitalism and what was commonly called socialism; the atmospheric setting of Le Carre novels, David Bowie’s Low, and Wim Wenders’ films.

For socialists Berlin has been a focus of hope and defeat. In the early twentieth century it was the stage for the rise of the mass German Social Democratic Party with its revolutionary wing and its decline when it supported the First World War. It was where Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht died in the heroic Spartacus uprising in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, where the Bauhaus movement was housed until forced out by the Nazis, where Brecht wrote plays and poetry against capitalism and achieved a detente with Stalinism, where the Nazi Reich fell, where the workers launched the first post-war uprising against Stalinism in 1953, and where the Wall finally fell in 1989.
Now at the end of the twentieth century the city is once again a microcosm of larger events. Berlin is being transformed into the ‘capital’ of Europe. Two cities, two systems — a square peg and a round hole — are being forcibly merged.

I revisited Berlin earlier this year to see what changes were taking place and to renew acquaintances with Margrit and Kosta who I had met through our connection with the German Adult Education Association. They live in East Berlin and share the difficulties many in the East are experiencing as a result of reunification. While parts of Berlin boom, this is certainly not being enjoyed by many in the East.

In 1994, four years after reunification, the city was still effectively divided. Even though the public transport system had been reintegrated and the Wall removed, you only had to travel a bit away from the centre of East Berlin to feel that you were out of the West and in a central European city. The rebuilding which had occurred at that time was centred around the famous city spine of Unter der Linden, with its museums, monuments and hotels, and the Alexanderplatz.

Three years later much has changed and yet much has remained the same. The first thing that strikes you is the massive construction that dominates the city skyline and which by 2003 will have remodelled much of central Berlin.

Work has been started on 2,000 new buildings since the Wall came down and there are 1,200 cranes towering above the inner city districts of Tiergarten and Mitte alone. New government offices are being built around the Reichstag in preparation for the move from Bonn and the river Spree has even been diverted during building work to allow new train tunnels to be sunk into the river bed. Thirty per cent of the workforce is now involved in the construction industry.

The bleak corridor that was the Wall which divided the city between the Reichstag and Potsdamer Platz will yield up the commercial, government, transport and entertainment heart of Berlin in time for its restoration as the ‘capital’ of Europe. By then £130 billion will have been invested in Berlin.

Friedrichstrasse, once one of the city’s elegant shopping and commercial streets, has been given a face lift as the grime from decades of neglect has been removed. The French department store Galeries Lafayette, Gucci, Benetton, DKNY, and American Express have all opened up for business in the past four years, though to mixed success.

Friedrichstrasse acquired a different claim to fame in the cold war years. It ran from the train station where westerners first entered East Berlin to Checkpoint Charlie. Today the Checkpoint square is in the process of being removed from history. The football field sized no-man’s land of concrete, barriers and checkpoints is today being replaced by the ‘Checkpoint Charlie Marketing Centre’. The Centre, which is the work of the world’s leading post-modern architect Philip Johnson, will house businesses and a plaza.
Johnson is only one of a number of international architects who have been attracted to the city to turn Berlin into a modern centre for capital. Aldo Rossi, Norman Foster and Nicholas Grimshaw have designed a new housing and business centre, government centre and stock exchange.

But all has not gone to plan. The expected building boom has not been what was hoped for. In April this year the Berliner Grundkreditbank admitted that it had lost more than £40 million through property investments after a 50% fall in prices since 1994. This followed the sacking of the chairman of the Berliner Bank last year after reporting losses of £800 million

Hundreds of developers moved into Berlin after reunification in 1990, investing billions of marks in projects that turned the city into Europe’s biggest building site.

Commercial rents soared, driving many long established shops and restaurants out of business. Young squatters, who occupied derelict buildings in the east of the city and turned them into bars, cafes and clubs, have been driven out of the centre by developers eager to build new offices.

The opening of Galeries Lafayette on Friedrichstrasse was meant to herald the turning of the tide. Instead the store has failed to attract customers and many other new buildings on the famous street remain unoccupied.

The move from Bonn to Berlin has also been delayed as rising costs and disaffection with the amount being spent has coincided with the slow down of the economy and rising unemployment.

The aim of the German government is that Berlin will become a showpiece of the new Europe. The massive building program is being funded through a combination of private and state investment, with the state providing the new transport links, the relocated government buildings and much of the tourist sites around East Berlin. Their expectation is that the relocation of the government, the hoped for influx of European Union centres and the establishment of head offices such as Sony and Mercedes Benz will give industry, developers and the government the boost that has so far failed to materialise.
Despite reunification West and East remain divided economically. Wage rates for the same job still differ in many cases and unemployment in some areas of East Berlin, where employment if not useful work was once guaranteed, is 50% and more.
Margrit and Kosta live in the suburbs away from the centre of East Berlin. They have both just turned 50. Margrit had been an adult educator and Kosta a bookkeeper.
They live near Treptower Park the East’s sprawling wooded park well away from the Mitte. The Spree borders one side of the Park and in the middle is the massive monument to 5,000 Soviet soldiers who died in the battle of Berlin.

Margrit is now employed as a temporary civil servant by the unified Ministry of Education while Kosta lost his job some years ago. Their daughter finished school the year before and their son was nearing the end of his.

While they are critical of some aspects of the East German regime, they express a sense of loss or nostalgia for what they once had. They don’t expect that Kosta will work again even though he has been undertaking retraining schemes and now speaks English and can apply capitalist accounting methods.

Now they fear that Margrit will lose her job at the Ministry. She explains that almost all the staff from the East are temporary employees while those from the West are permanent. A new wave of redundancies is imminent and temporary staff will be the first to be sacked since not enough volunteers have put up their hands.

This comes on top of new, increased higher education fees for their children and a protracted dispute over ownership and repairs of their flat and a fourfold rent increase. Housing has become one of the most contested areas of ownership rights in the city.
Margrit and Kosta had lived in their modest but comfortable three bedroom flat for thirty years when its ownership was reclaimed by a West German after reunification. They were allowed to remain in the flat but last year the owner refused to replace the broken heating system. He suggested they move away while it was being fixed, a proposition they didn’t take up as once out of the flat they could be refused permission to return or forced into a less secure, more expensive lease. Instead they borrowed thousands of marks to get the job done and now are in court again trying to get reimbursed.
If Margrit loses her job the family will be in a desperate position. They ask ‘what use is freedom if you can’t afford anything?’

After coffee they take us on a ‘socialists’ tour of East Berlin. First we visit the Gedenkstatte der Sozialisten, or Socialists’ Memorial. The centre piece of the park is a burial ground where Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht hold pride of place under a stone telling us ‘the dead remind us’ (die toten mahnen uns). Surrounding them are the graves of Stalinists such as Walter Ulbricht and other notorious figures of the German SED.

Each January a parade would march to the cemetery. The marchers carried red roses to place on the graves and East German leaders would make hypocritical speeches extolling the virtues of ‘socialism’. Today the cemetery is no longer maintained by the state but by supporters and the January parades have become something of a rallying point for the old supporters of the old regime.

From there we drive the length of Potsdamer Strasse where pieces of the Wall with commissioned paintings, such as Brezhnev and Honecker’s passionate kiss, have been placed side by side. And then to Treptower Park and the Soviet War Memorial erected in 1948. Along the perimeter of the memorial are massive granite slabs with quotations from Stalin, leading up to the colossal bronze figures of a Soviet soldier supporting the German child as they symbolically crush Nazism in typical socialist realist style. This memorial hasn’t been removed partly one suspects because of its sheer size but more because of the 5,000 bodies buried under the memorial. However the constant fear of neo-nazi attack means that it is now permanently guarded.

Throughout Berlin there is a contest for history and a denial of history. For instance, apart from a few isolated pockets and the remaining Checkpoint Charlie Museum it is now very difficult to find anything about the Wall. What generally remains is ‘safe’ history.
In the West the main boulevard linking west with east Berlin is the Strasse des 17 Juni, named after the date of the 1953 workers’ uprising in East Berlin. Around the corner from our pension and opposite the Technical University is a small memorial to the ‘victims of Stalinism’ maintained by the Christian Democrats.

There are other more poignant reminders such as the bombed out Wilhelm Church by the Zoo Station and the 12 foot slogan in front of the Ka De We department store listing each of the concentration camps under the statement ‘Places of terror which we must never be allowed to forget’. Both sides wish to maintain the fiction that it was they who were the real opponents of fascism.

What open resistance there is to the remaking of Berlin can be seen around precincts such as Prenzlauer Berg and around Oranienburger Tor. Working class organisation in these areas has been replaced by alternative lifestylism opposed to the prettification of the city.

Prenzlauer Berg was one of the few areas of Berlin which consistently voted for the Communist Party in the early days of the Nazi regime and again in the 1980s had the largest number of informal votes when any vote against the SED represented courage.
Today, it along with Oranienburger Tor, is home to grunge cafes and bars, squats and artists’ studios. In the big derelict buildings near the Jewish synagogue the yards have been landscaped with recycled rubbish, metal and building materials. A sign is draped from the 3rd storey glassless window saying ‘the Council and investors are stealing public space.’

Dissatisfaction with reunification is easy to find in the West also. Unemployment is rising, cuts in government spending grow and immigration is a big issue. As each cut is made Berliners can look to the skyline to see where that money is going instead. Anna a German language teacher in an adult education centre says that jobs are being cut and that she is using outdated textbooks because there is no money to produce new ones. Teaching German to immigrants has become a low priority.

A young businessman in Frankfurt expressed surprise that we would visit Berlin. He saw it only as a problem place. Like many he resents the East because it is a drain on his taxes. He feels he has more in common with Parisians, Romans or Viennese than with Berliners.

In the East they resent the West because the promises of reunification haven’t materialised.

The government is pinning its hopes on the market, underwritten by the state, to lead to jobs and growth.

What is clear, is that whatever euphoria there may have been in late 1989 has evaporated. Beyond the glass facades of the new buildings lies a much less settled population.

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