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329 CONCLUSION During the Cold War, rhetoric in the east and west had attempted to draw clear lines of political, cultural, and economic division. In 1989–90, the collapse of the SED regime and the Volkskammer’s subsequent decision to dissolve the GDR and become part of the Federal Republic seemed to confirm the veracity of this rhetoric. Newspaper articles covering the historic night when East Germans were first allowed to cross the intra-Berlin border freely reflect the internalization of the western narrative of the Cold War, painting a portrait of East Germans who were finally able to visit a “forbidden land” after having “gazed” at it for so long from across the wall. One article describes the end of the GDR as a “great awakening” that would allow for the continuation of “the human march westward,” a phrase that referred specifically to an East German mass exodus to the Federal Republic but that also suggested a deeper, more elemental and universal pull toward the “West,” as a place and a concept.1 The discourse around the “fall” of the wall did, and to a great extent still does, convey an aura of inevitability and finality to the events of November 1989. Within this discourse, Germany’s and Berlin’s divisions are discussed as temporary breaks within a single, continuous German history. The use of the term “great awakening” also evokes the western view that the Cold War was a period of stasis that Germany and Berlin had been forced to wait out. Despite the fact that each Berlin had for decades been the major focus of political, economic, and architectural activity, particularly in the GDR, western journalists and scholars used the metaphor of sleep and awakening to describe Berlin before and after 1990. In her study of rebuilding Berlin, for example, the political scientist Elizabeth Strom comments that “Berlin, like the protagonist in the movie Sleeper who awoke to an unfamiliar world after decades in a freezer, ‘woke up’ in 1990 with an economic structure rooted in the 1960s.”2 Now that Berlin had emerged from its dormant state and returned to what Helmut Kohl, in his 1987 speech at the 750th jubilee, termed “normalcy,” the city could continue on the path it would have traversed if not for its division. Long CONCLUSION Constructing the Capital of the Berlin Republic 330 Conclusion hemmed in by the wall, the process of redesigning the city could “finally” begin. This interpretation of Berlin’s recent history is particularly evident in the discussion about the city’s physical construction, often identified as reconstruction and thus implying a process of correcting errant development or restoring what had been lost. The “reconstruction” of Berlin sparked a heated discussion of how it would, in the words of the historian Michael Z. Wise, “be different this time around.”3 How would the “new” Berlin avoid a “revival of Speer’s megalomaniacal schemes, of the grandiose air of old Prussian ministries, or of Wilhelmine pomposity” and instead evoke the city’s grander past, its “golden age”? How would the city’s building administrators, architects, and planners make Berlin once again “look like Berlin”?4 Such questions were predicated first on the notion that the period of division had been an aberration of Berlin’s “true” historical path and second, on the notion that dealing with the city’s recent history as the GDR capital was less important for its leaders than confronting its past as, for example, a Nazi capital. The evocation of a “golden age” was problematic, as opinions differed greatly on which epoch was to be considered the city’s most appealing and successful . While some argued that the cultural and artistic ferment of the Weimar era marked the city’s highest point of ascension, others went further back in history, to the turn of the nineteenth century and the age of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. To which period would planners turn for the models they would follow in creating what was, once again, called the “New Berlin ”? Which was the most authentic, “real” Berlin? Despite talk of “reconstruction” and “reunification,” the two “halves” of Germany and Berlin could never have been fused seamlessly like the figures in Keith Haring’s Berlin Wall mural. The two pieces no longer fit easily together, in part because by the time the border was reopened in 1989, years of separate political, economic, and cultural development had resulted in very different cultural and physical landscapes and had made each country...

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