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In the 1980s West Berlin’s seedier districts, including Kreuzberg, began to show some signs of gentrification—a clothing boutique here, an organic grocery there. Many West Berliners welcomed this development, but the crazies of Kreuzberg did not. They feared that if the trend continued their beloved Kiez would end up looking like Gharlottenburg—or, much worse, Munich. To prevent such a catastrophe they launched a guerrilla war against the encroaching “schicki-mickies”—their term for anyone who wanted to gentrify their scene. In an ugly culture clash recounted in 1988 by the American journalist Jane Kramer, an artistic couple who had moved to Kreuzberg in the early 1980s ran head-on into the local version of Neighborhood Watch when they tried to open a modestly upscale French restaurant on Oranienstrasse. The wife-chef hoped to raise the tone of her adopted district by teaching the natives to eat beurre blanc à l’estragon rather than their beloved currywurst. The restaurant, called Maxwell’s, opened at Christmas 1985. It was successful enough commercially, though few Kreuzberger came through its doors. When some locals finally did show up, they came not to eat but to trash the place; they also subjected the terrified owners to a Volksgericht (people’s court), finding them guilty of subverting the “infrastructure” of the neighborhood. Shortly thereafter, a troupe arrived during the dinner hour and emptied buckets of shit all over the restaurant. Maxwell’s closed, and the owners moved to Schöneberg.

While the squatters’ movement may be said to have constituted the hard core of West Berlin’s alternative scene in the 1970s and 1980s, its soft core consisted primarily of the artists, intellectuals, students, teachers, architects, and gallery owners who descended on the city for the high salaries, low rents, and feeling of self-importance they got from living in the hippest place in Germany. Like a kind of bo-hemian SS, they tended to dress entirely in black. In the firm belief that mens sana in corpore sano constituted a contradiction in terms, they smoked and drank heroically, becoming proud wrecks before their time. On any given night they could be found idling in their favorite cafés and Kneipen—from the seedy Pinox in Kreuzberg to the chic Paris Bar in Charlottenburg. Those with roots in the student protest movement liked to live in Wohngemeinschaften—living collectives that were meant to be models of harmony and sharing, but which in reality often turned out to be war zones of incessant bitching over who ate all the Quark in the communal refrigerator or whose dog befouled the floor in the communal foyer. Another source of anxiety was the difficulty of maintaining love relationships beyond a few days. In Peter Schneider’s novel Couplings, a witty tale about sexual warfare among West Berlin’s graying ’68ers, the protagonist, a molecular biologist, concludes that “some form of separation virus was raging in the walled city.” Although West Berlin’s communards lived right next door to a socialist state whose principles they vaguely shared, few actually went there. After all, crossing the Wall meant having to trade in good western marks for near worthless eastern ones, eating mediocre food, breathing heavily polluted air, and listening to East German rock bands earnestly trying to sound like Pink Floyd.

Beginning in the late 1970s, West Berlin’s alternative crowd had its own political party, Die Alternative Liste (AL), which was allied with the Green Party. In 1981 the party won 5 percent of the Berlin vote, which gave it the right to representation in the Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus (Assembly), the West German Bundestag, and the European Parliament. This achievement sent shock waves through the older parties, for among other unorthodox ideas the AL supported squatters’ rights and the ouster of the Western Allies from West Berlin. In 1985 Petra Kelly, one of the Green Party’s founders (and, interestingly enough, half-American), protested in an open letter to the mayor of West Berlin against the “military occupation” of the city by the Allies. “Do not the Berliners, of all people, have the right to decide if and how they are defended in the case of war?” she asked. Her idea of defense was to declare the city a nuclear-free zone.

Real, Existing Socialism

West Berlin’s student protesters and apostles of alternative lifestyles had few counterparts on the other side of the Wall, at least during the Ulbricht era. In East Berlin in the 1950s and 1960s the only youth demonstrations allowed by the state were marches for world peace or nuclear disarmament. Ulbricht regarded the West’s toleration of unsupervised student activism and its burgeoning alternative culture as signs of weakness.