November in Berlin: the End of the Everyday

One of the problems with developing any historical awareness of the everyday is that it appears to have neither a past nor a future. The time of routine is unbounded, interminable, uninterruptable: the way things have always been, always will be. In the everyday, as Maurice Blanchot writes, 'we are neither born nor do we die: hence the weight and the enigmatic force of everyday truth'.¹ No wonder, then, that theorists of the quotidian have been particularly interested in what happens when these routines are disrupted in dramatic or violent ways. Such moments shatter the continuum of the everyday, its existence as simply a blank present of waiting and boredom, separate from the event-driven processes of history. They force us to confront fundamental questions about the quotidian: what are we waiting for, when will the waiting end, and what will we do when it does?

The fall of the Berlin Wall is an obvious recent example of this disturbance of the everyday, the transformation of unthinking routine into new forms of awareness. For a few, extraordinary days in November 1989 Berliners shook off the mundanity and predictability of their daily lives.They danced around in their nightshirts, let off fireworks and kissed strangers, with whom they exchanged the single word: 'Wahnsinn!' (Crazy!) Rules and conventions were turned on their head. In a country with a mandatory closing time of 6.30 P.M., shops stayed open as long as they liked. In a country where minor traffic infringements are serious offences, people jaywalked, climbed up trees and roadsigns, and those with a GDR passport travelled on public transport for free. In order to make sense of this extraordinary interruption of routine, though, we need to understand the nature of the everyday itself as a space for the quiet accumulation of repetitive acts, and of more subtle, unnoticed transformations. In other words, we need to think about this moment in relation to its 'before' and 'after'.

Cold War Berlin lent itself readily to dramatic iconography. Its most recognized sites were those where ordinary Berliners rarely ventured: Checkpoint Charlie, which was only open to Allied forces and officials, and Glienicke Bridge, the scene of East-West exchanges of spies and dissidents. But in this notably untouristic, working city of studied boringness, the more significant reality of the Wall was that it bisected and transformed the routines of everyday life. This was especially the case because the postwar partition of Berlin had followed ancient district boundaries rather than more pragmatic contemporary divisions. When the Wall was built, it was set back slightly into GDR territory but otherwise followed the Soviet sector's border strictly, and so threaded its way between tram tracks, rivers, squares, railway stations and even, in Bernauerstraße, between houses and the pavement outside. Its arbitrariness meant that it cut through the heart of the quotidian life of the city, most notably for the tens of thousands of Grenzgänger (border-crossers), who lived in the East but worked in the West, and who suddenly could not go to their jobs.For many Berliners, the flashpoint during the Wall's construction in August 1961 was not the roadblocks or wire fences but Friedrichstraße station, where the shared U-Bahn and S-Bahn lines between East and West were interrupted by customs posts. Here, guards had to restrain distraught East Berliners as the information was conveyed to them in the most mundane way possible - a posted announcement, signed by the Minister of Transport, about train services being 'discontinued'.²

If the erection of the Berlin Wall transformed the everyday life of the city, though, its survival is an example of how the extraordinary can be routinized, can develop its own rhythms, expectations and realities. From the mid 1960s onwards...