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National Geographic : 1982 Jan
Contents
In the northern village of Liibars, the farmers grow wheat and barley. In Spandau in the west, where Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess lives out a lonely sentence, residents still speak of "going to Berlin." In the south west, the hamlet of Steinstiicken reaches into the GDR like a cherry connected by a stem of wall-lined road-another box in a city of boxes in boxes. My room in the Hotel Continental seemed out of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Sto ries of the 1930s. In an anteroom with potted ferns and the soft light of frosted glass, I would sit and listen to birds singing in the Hinterhof,the quiet courtyard between the cool stone buildings. The maid was a buxom Italian named Victoria, the night deskman an entertain ingly wild-eyed socialist. The assistant man ager, Artur Vogt, hobnobbed with the city's past, and liked to say things like: "I knew Marlene Dietrich when she served cognac." And best of all, the hotel sat right on the Kur fiirstendamm, Ku'damm for short, West Berlin's bazaar of affluence and excess. But it's not what it used to be, said Artur. "It's all going downhill. The good shops are moving out, and what's coming in their place? Peep shows and hamburger stands. They kill the city." The street life of the new West Berlin swirls around the ruins of Kaiser Wilhelm Church, left as a memorial to the war. On the corner of Joachimstalerstrasse, build ings are stacked like marzipan cakes frosted with neon, and billboards hawk suntan lo tion and blue movies. In the Cafe Kranzler, the grande dames of Berlin, with their hel metlike felt hats, sip Berliner Weisse mit Schuss, white beer injected with raspberry syrup. Many elegant shops remain, gleam ing with porcelain and leather goods. In the opulent KaDeWe department store, shop pers are faced with whole wild boars, fresh lion meat, and 1,400 kinds of sausage. Demonstrations are almost routine in a city politically obligated to tolerate free ex pression. Special-interest groups pop up and down like hand puppets to shout out their causes-anarchists hooting at capitalism, left-wing Turks battling "imperialism," right-wing Turks battling left-wing Turks, environmentalists protesting dirty air. "Berlin demands very much from you," The brotherhood of protest sweeps full scale acrossa city morally obligated to tolerance, as young West Germans flock to West Berlinfor its keen edge of excitement as well as for the draft exemption accorded residents. Demonstrationsagainstthe housing shortageignite the streets (above), and squattersoccupy more than a hundred vacant houses. As in the Kreuzberg home of this young squatter (right), some landlords have retaliatedby destroying plumbing and heatingfixtures. Recent demonstrationshave been more political-protestingU. S. nuclear missiles in Europe. National Geographic,January 1982
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