Vor der Mauer. Berlin in der Ost-West-Konkurrenz 1948 bis 1961 by Michael Lemke (review)

In recent years, historians of postwar Germany have labored to make sense of the “asymmetrically integrated parallel history” (asymmetrisch verflochtene Parallelgeschichte) of the two German states—a phrase first introduced by Christoph Kleßmann in the 1990s and now widely deployed in the literature. It has proven devilishly difficult to craft narratives that highlight genuine interactions between East and West, rather than merely juxtaposing two contrasting systems. If it can work at all, the border regions are a logical place to start, as seen in recent publications by Edith Sheffer (Burned Bridge, 2011) and Astrid Eckert (“Geteilt, aber nicht unverbunden,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, January 2014). And what better place to find a porous border than divided Berlin?

Lemke, already one of the most prolific authors on Cold War Germany, shows a deft touch here in focusing his analysis on the years of direct “system competition” (11) between the West Berlin Senate and the East Berlin Magistrate. In theory, his book distinguishes among political, socioeconomic, and cultural interactions; but his main interest is politics and he relies almost exclusively on the records of city administrators. This is no time to grouse about top-down perspectives however: Lemke wields police reports and committee plans to great effect in conveying a granular sense of how ordinary East and West Berliners negotiated the opportunities and hazards presented by the open border. He tells of border crossers ambling back and forth to visit church services, youth festivals, operas, and orchestras, second-rate Hollywood films, and third-rate bakeries and discount shops. In the early 1950s, West Berliners were buying one-third of their groceries in the East, and they gladly availed themselves of cheap haircuts and other inexpensive services (366). The East Berlin Magistrate tried to halt opportunistic border traffic, which exacerbated their own food insecurity, yet they learned to appreciate the inflow of hard currency. For their part, East Berliners looked westward for manufactured consumer goods, above all shoes (349).

One of the strengths of the book is to highlight just how much the two half-governments could do to make mischief in the other half of the city. The Senate harassed the Magistrate by goading East Berliners to demand free elections; the population responded by mailing in some 400,000 ration-card stubs in October 1950 in a clear sign of dissatisfaction with the rule of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED). The Senate also sought to counter the impact of the enormous youth festivals in East Berlin by inviting participants to cross over and enjoy Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and cake) with private West Berliners. For its part, the SED took advantage of its legal status in West Berlin to campaign vigorously in local elections. It tried in vain to split the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) and castigate Willy Brandt as an agent of US imperialism. The upshot is that the rival bureaucracies did more than heap propagandistic scorn upon one another; they actively worked to undermine the legitimacy and effectiveness of the other side. Lemke’s is surely the most thorough account of this tit-for-tat disruption since Diethelm Prowe published Weltstadt in Krisen in 1973.

Was divided Berlin inherently unstable? Was it inevitable that the border would close? On the one hand, Lemke does not deal in teleology. He notes how stubbornly the Magistrate clung to all-Berlin cultural events, capitalizing on the inheritance of Unter den Linden and the historic city core. On the other hand, economic policymaking almost always pointed in one direction, toward severing still existing ties across the sectors. In 1952, for example, West Berliners lost control over property they owned in the Soviet sector; that same year the Magistrate amputated the bus and trolley lines that passed between East and West. Still, the sectors remained deeply intertwined. At the turn of the decade, West Berlin’s booming economy drew in huge...