The Wall consolidated the position of the two distinct centres of the city. The eastern centre was renewed, with historic building blocks being completely demolished to make room for the new, lavish Communist city-building concept. Even the historic city palace, residence of the Prussian Kings and German Emperors, was torn down. Broad streets were built and huge panel flats dominated the city’s image. A new landmark, the 368-metre high television tower was built in the demolished centre. Only few boroughs, such as Friedrichshain and Prenzlauer Berg retained their old structure, and they are today among the most original areas of Berlin that can be found.
East Berlin profited from being a city that both had a historic core and room to expand. Although formally illegal, new boroughs were added at the eastern borders, Marzahn being the most important one. The city had a more or less intact infrastructure, and only a few underground stations were closed because they were served by trains that were coming from and going to the west. These “ghost stations” became an eerie reminder of the partition, with the trains passing them at walking speed but never stopping.
West Berlin on the other hand was not a historic city. Most of it had only become a formal part of Berlin in 1920, and had been dependent of what became East Berlin. It had no official town hall, no central railway station, and much worse, little room to expand. Some of the first measures that were taken were the re-opening of Tempelhof airport as the city’s main commercial airport and the founding of a new university – the Free University – because the historic Humboldt University was in the east. The train station Zoologischer Garten became the city’s new central station, as it was located in the centre of the New West. Schöneberg Town Hall became West Berlin’s new town hall. The city was constantly rebuilt, and when housing space began to get scarce again, new settlements were founded in the few empty spaces within the walled-in city, such as Gropiusstadt south of Neukölln and Märkisches Viertel in the northern borough of Reinickendorf. These new quarters were soon occupied by the poorest elements of the population: the working-class, and later mostly Turkish and Arab immigrants. To this day, Berlin is home to the biggest Turkish community outside Turkey. The historic infrastructure of the city was completely revamped when a new motorway was built, leading critics to remark that West Berlin was turned into a huge interchange.
(Continued in next post)
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