EASTERN NOSTALGIA for life before the fall of the Berlin Wall was such a widespread and well-documented phenomenon in the years after 1989 that the Germans invented a word for it – Ostalgie, writes DENIS STAUNTON
For many in West Berlin, however, the sense of loss was almost as painful – even if it was seldom amplified in public.
For nearly three decades since the Wall was built in 1961, West Berliners had lived in a small world of their own in which, despite travel restrictions and the absence of full democratic rights, they enjoyed a kind of freedom and vitality unequalled elsewhere in Germany.
Arriving in West Berlin in 1985, I found a city where jobs were easy to find but nobody seemed to work too hard, you could party all night for a few Deutschmarks and embrace any lifestyle if it didn’t harm anyone but yourself. It became home for most of the next 15 years.
At first, the enclave’s prospects looked bleak, as industry, investment and many among the professional classes fled to West Germany.
Generous subsidies from Bonn, however, kept the half-city afloat and by the 1970s cheap housing and immunity from military service had attracted a new generation of westerners.
Although West Berlin was treated in many ways as part of West Germany, it was governed by the three western military powers – France, Britain and the United States – each of which ran a sector of the city.
Most West Berliners avoided visiting East Berlin, partly on account of the gruff manner of border guards who enforced the midnight curfew for returning but also because they found the experience unsettling and depressing.
For those of us from elsewhere, however, crossing into the east on foot at Checkpoint Charlie or by train at Friedrichstrasse was thrilling, and many East Berliners felt easier talking to non-Germans.
For the young, West Berlin offered endless opportunities for pleasure, with scores of clubs and bars that got busy around 1am and stayed open as long as anybody wanted another drink.
Many were enrolled as students for a decade or more, seldom attending lectures or sitting exams and surviving comfortably on two or three shifts each week at a bar or in a restaurant.
German unification exposed easterners and westerners to one another for the first time in more than a generation but for West Berliners the greatest disruption came when the government moved from Bonn to Berlin.
The city was suddenly full of politicians, civil servants and lobbyists, most of whom congregated in the newly fashionable districts in the East.
Many bars and restaurants in the West closed in the 1990s as nightlife migrated eastwards and when former chancellor Gerhard Schröder cut welfare payments in 2005, the last survivors of West Berlin’s glory days had to take the once unthinkable step of getting a regular job. The old, easy life was gone forever.