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241 CHAPTER 6 By the late 1970s, West Berlin’s reputation as a center of protest and dissent was firmly established in much of the western public’s imagination. Although issues such as lack of housing, rising numbers of immigrants, drug abuse, and high unemployment presented challenges in cities throughout West Germany, the public there viewed West Berlin as uniquely afflicted with these problems. They were encouraged in this regard by press accounts , which painted a picture of the city as aberrant, pushed far outside the mainstream by its corrupt government and by its fractious citizenry and the values they espoused. The image of West Berlin as the “capital of the scene” presented a challenge to its image as forged in the Berlin Crisis. In the 1980s, as Cold War tensions once again heated up, West Berlin’s civic leaders saw the celebration of Berlin’s 750th anniversary in 1987 as an opportunity to repair the city’s image, restore the legitimacy of its government , and reestablish West Berlin’s centrality on the global-political stage by once again linking it to mainstream, dominant values. One step in the effort to improve West Berlin’s reputation involved altering the physical appearance of its urban environment—its cityscape, or Stadtbild. This effort to refurbish the cityscape was one reason why the activities and events associated with the Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA), preparations for which had been under way since the late 1970s, were ultimately yoked to the 1987 celebration. In comparison with the earlier International Building Exhibition, in 1957, IBA 87 reflected the more subdued tone of the late Cold War period. The exhibition also represented a response to the critiques leveled by West Berlin’s squatter movement and the architectural community since the 1960s. As a result, the IBA’s planners focused less on creating an image of consensus and control than had the organizers of Interbau. Instead, the exhibition focused on acknowledging the various divides—cultural, social, geographic—which crisscrossed (West) Berlin, and, in doing so, it attempted to normalize them, reframing West Berlin’s reputation as a center of dissent as proof of an inherently democratic nature. Like the jubilee celebration as a whole, the IBA was an effort to SIX BACK TO THE CENTER Restoring West Berlin’s Image and Identity 242 Back to the Center reconcile the global and local demands placed on West Berlin. In the end, however, both had the effect of foregrounding the contradictions between West Berlin’s international and regional identities and between its media image and the actual circumstances in the city. Ultimately, it was the Berlin Wall that would reemerge as the ultimate and defining symbol of divides of and in West Berlin. Ironically, its iconic status would be confirmed by its destruction in 1989–90. West Berlin’s “Identity Crisis” In the 1970s and early 1980s, the mass media had diagnosed West Berlin as a “sick” city. The changed tenor and scope of the Cold War, along with greater visibility of West Berlin’s urban problems, led many to conclude that it was not only “sick” and “dying” but also that it was in the midst of an “identity crisis.”1 In both explicit and implicit terms, critics, journalists, and politicians expressed extreme ambivalence about West Berlin’s political identity, on both a global and a national scale. This lack of a distinct image, in both a literal and a figurative sense, reinforced the perception, held by many in the press, that West Berlin was without a clear function in relation to either West Germany or the Cold War west as a whole. As the prominent journalist Jürgen Engert commented in 1985, “[West Berlin] knows what it was, but it still does not know what it is, let alone what it will be.”2 The notion that West Berlin was suffering from a crisis of identity was partly just that, but it was related also to very real social, economic, and political developments. After forty years as a divided city and twenty years surrounded by a wall, West Berlin’s role within West German national identity had necessarily changed, partly as a result of the rhetorical stance that had helped to establish the political, cultural, and literal borders between East and West Germany. The former western Allied powers and the Federal Republic had long argued that West Berlin existed only as a result of East German aggression, “a symbol and victim of [its] division,” and that this supposedly temporary...

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