The First Days of Berlin. Ulrich Gutmair

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Preface to the English Edition

      Some thirty years ago, Berlin was a sleepy place, detached from the rest of the world. Long gone were the days when the city was the most powerful industrial centre in continental Europe; a metropolis, birthplace of artistic avant-gardes, battleground for political ideas, welcoming place for revolutionaries of all kinds. The Nazis had exiled most of the artists, many of whom were Jewish, who had made Berlin a vibrant, hypermodern city. They had considered jazz to be ‘un-German’, and modern art to be ‘degenerate’.

      On 2 May 1945, the Red Army finally conquered Berlin. The tyranny that caused the death of 50 million people in Europe, and was supported by some Germans until the bitter end, was over. The Cold War split the city into two halves. As a whole, Berlin found itself pushed from the centre of German culture to the periphery. What remained was the myth of those Golden Years.

The eastern part of the city came under Soviet administration. The socialist German Democratic Republic was founded and East Berlin became its capital. In 1961, the Wall was built to prevent East Germans from fleeing to the West. In the wake of the 1980s, this socialist state was broke and, ironically, kept alive for some more years through loans from West Germany. But the GDR was not able to reform itself. Its government was finally brought down by a peaceful revolution of its citizens. Similar revolutions took place in most of the countries in Eastern Europe, showing the world that people really have the power – if the ones in charge decide not to use rifles and tanks against them. On 4 June 1989, the Chinese government brutally crushed the democratic movement in Tiananmen Square. So when hundreds of thousands began to join the anti-government demonstrations in Berlin and Leipzig in the autumn of the same year, the fear that the East German Politburo would opt for the ‘Chinese solution’ was in the air.

      After 1945 the Western part of Berlin was controlled by the Western Allies – the USA, the UK and France – and later became a part of the Federal Republic of Germany in the West. During the Cold War, the Western Allies considered West Berlin to be ‘the showcase of the Free World’ within the Eastern Bloc. Surrounded by the Wall, the enclave relied on subsidies from the West German government. Had it not been for the student revolt in 1967, the squatters’ movement, the young Germans who came here to avoid the draft, and artists like Einstürzende Neubauten, Iggy Pop and David Bowie, who loved the morbid charm of this grey and forgotten place, we would not have been able to say that anything significant happened here during the 1970s and 1980s.

      When the Wall was opened by East German government officials, on the evening of 9 November 1989, the city slowly woke up again. The first days of reunified Berlin began.

This is a book about memory. When I started writing it, about fifteen years ago, I wanted to deliver a historical account of a short but formative transition period. In the year between the fall of the Wall and the reunification of the two states, a space of possibility had opened up. While many of the elder East Berliners were struggling to adapt to the new system, young people from Berlin and from all over the world had the economic and political freedom to realize their dreams, to create artworks and situations in a communal spirit. Houses were squatted, galleries were opened, basements were turned into clubs.

      I had moved to Berlin from Bavaria to study history three weeks before the Wall fell. Now, I could study history in the making. I began to understand how revolutionary events actually disrupt and transcend its course. In those days, even the passage of time felt out of control. It seemed to speed up. Every day a new experience, every night a new sound. Rapid political change was followed by a fast transformation of city space. And paradoxically, it also seemed as though time stood still. Berlin-Mitte was an almost pastoral cityscape, a utopia in the true sense of the word. A non-place, in which the sound of the bass drum would set things in motion.

      When we went out for a night of dancing in some makeshift club, sometimes we would reach a state of euphoria that, by definition, is the closest a living being can get to the eternal. Forgetting the past and the future, while getting lost in music, we would enter the magical time-space of absolute presence.

      When I started to write this book and tried to fill the gaps in my memory, to reclaim my own history that did not find many references in the rapidly changing surroundings, I studied newspapers and books, and more significantly, I asked a variety of people to tell me their stories. This book is also their book, and I have tried to treat all those stories with respect while keeping the somewhat cruel distance you need to write truthfully.

I expected all the popular clubs, like Tresor or E-Werk, to be remembered, and eminent figures in the art and music scene to get the recognition they deserved. So I saw it as my duty to try and catch the ephemeral, to detect the zeitgeist in the lives of those who might be overlooked even though their presence and work were important in forming the culture of this temporary autonomous zone that shapes the image of Berlin to this day.

      While working on this book, I spent considerable time trying to find ways to avoid writing ‘I’, thinking that there is a pompousness in it – if not accredited by necessity, the economy of the text itself. But this ‘I’ contained a higher truth. This is a history of the events and developments in Berlin-Mitte that tries to take into account as many perspectives as possible. But ultimately, it is also my personal story.

      This is a book about cities. What Berliners fear most today is that their city might meet the fate of London, Paris and New York, where only the wealthy can afford to live, or even worse, where many buildings are not places to dwell in any more, but mere investments, staying empty for most of the year.

      After Berlin had again become the capital of Germany, for some time its population rose by about 50,000 per year. At the same time, city government had to sell many of the publicly owned housing enterprises to fill empty coffers. When, after the global financial crisis in 2008, capital was fleeing into real estate, investors from all over the world discovered that real estate was relatively cheap in Berlin.

      Berlin has seen a steep rise in rents in recent years – and Berlin is traditionally a city of renters, not owners. So in 2020, R2G – the coalition of Social Democrats, Socialists and the Green Party governing Berlin – decided to introduce legislation to freeze rents. Even though Germany’s Federal Constitution Court has declared the Berlin rent freeze to be null and void in the meantime, it is hailed by progressives as a powerful tool for the whole of Germany in order to keep cities diverse places, inhabitable for the many, not only the few.

For cities to be places open for everyone, culture has to play an important role. In May 2021, the German parliament decided that nightclubs should legally cease to be considered as places for entertainment and would now be treated as cultural sites. It means that urban planning regulations and building laws concerning museums and theatres now also apply to clubs. This is good news. An environment in which everyone is entitled and able to enjoy the good life cannot be created by market forces, but only by the body politic. The dance floor is one of the urban spaces where the body politic is constituting itself as a community transcending class, gender and colour.

      I want to thank my editor at Polity, Elise Heslinga, for helping to bring about the English translation of this book eight years after it was published in German. I am indebted to my translator, Simon Pare, who enthusiastically embarked on the mission of translating this book, and found the right English words to capture the ironies and transpose the rhythms of those sometimes very long and very German sentences.

      Ulrich Gutmair, May 2021