Berlin Calling

Dutschke saw the world’s urban centers in revolt, West Berlin one of the fronts. His vision was to transform all of Berlin into an open metropolis, independent of both East and West Germany. All of the city’s walls would come down, not just the concrete monstrosity cutting across the city. The Free and the Technical Universities (in the west), the Humboldt (in the east), and all of the city’s other academies would be dissolved in favor of a sprawling, unstructured “learning city.” Berlin would be governed by local councils and communes; workers would take over the factories while police and bureaucracy would be abolished. Self-organization would prevail from schools to hospitals. If it worked, it could be a model for a unified Germany, argued Dutschke, who, as a former GDR citizen, was one of the few student rebels who cared a fig about uniting Germany.

Like most of the Wahlberliner, or Berliners-by-choice

the nighttime demimonde

By the mid-1980s, a broad society of new wavers and punks, the whole queer community, house squatters, student rebels, and artists had, in terms of quantity, reached a critical mass.

At the height of the Cold War, West Berlin was as far as one could travel east without leaving the Western world.

“Hey, I have a totally cool idea,” he bubbled the next afternoon at the Fischbüro. “Let’s throw a party on the Kudamm [West Berlin’s pricey shopping mile]. We’ll say it’s a demonstration and call it the Love Parade.” The only way the group could occupy such a prominent street in the middle of the day was as a political demonstration. So they registered the party as a protest against the Berlin Wall.

Strolling through Friedrichshain’s Mainzer Strasse neighborhood in summer 1990 was a taste of what the afterworld would look like were God an anarchist. In a matter of weeks, squatters had transformed the tranquil environs around the two-block-long street north of Boxhagener Platz into a teeming boho paradise

One afternoon, out mushroom picking in rural Brandenburg, they came upon a prize even more sensational than the panzer: two abandoned Soviet MiG 21s, fighter aircraft, stripped of their weaponry and engines but otherwise intact.

On Prenzlauer Berg’s Schliemannstrasse, a group of rock climbers from the East German university town of Jena squatted one building, the edifice of which was turned into a climbing wall. The house became the headquarters of East Germany’s first independent climbing club.

At one in the morning, Lippok and his relatives returned to the Wall where the revelry was in full swing. “It was like everybody was on drugs. The vibes were super strange,” he remembers. “The [GDR] border guards, the biggest bastards ever, were waving and smiling. It was like everyone was on ecstasy.”