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Another well-publicized trial involved an officer of the East German Border Troops, Karl Bandemer, who commanded the 34th Border Regiment at the time of a particularly brutal murder at the Berlin Wall. According to trial testimony, on February 7, 1966, border guards opened fire on a construction worker named Willi Block as he tried to crawl through a coil of barbed wire. Hearing the shots, Bandemer rushed to the scene and discovered that the fugitive, though not yet wounded, was hopelessly caught in the wire. Rather than ordering his retrieval, Bandemer asked for an automatic pistol and opened fire on Block at a range of twenty meters. At least two border guards also fired. Over seventy rounds were expended, more than enough to dispatch Block. According to one witness, Bandemer bragged after the killing: “It takes the commander to come around to show the boys how these matters are handled.” In his defense, Bandemer claimed that the fatal shots had actually come from the western side of the Wall. Although the court did not buy this, it found the defendant guilty only of second-degree manslaughter, and imposed a sentence of three years’ imprisonment. Bandemer appealed the verdict on grounds of “legal error.” At the time of his appeal—April 1997—only one sentence in the more than fifty cases involving shootings at the Wall had been definitively upheld after the exhaustion of all appeals.

Arrivals and Departures

In the mid-1990s Berlin presented a complicated and contradictory picture. The Wall was down, but the city remained deeply divided. Citizens on either side of the former barrier tended to read different newspapers, listen to different radio stations, even smoke different brands of cigarettes. In the 1995 elections for Berlin’s House of Representatives, the PDS, or ex-Communists, became the strongest party in East Berlin with 38.3 percent of the eastern vote, while winning only 2.1 percent in the west. Great excitement over the town’s new status as capital-elect was tempered by frustration over the inevitable changes that came with reunification and a new political mission. The city’s extensive facelift belied economic stagnation, even decline. Companies and jobs were fleeing Berlin just as new migrants were pouring in from Eastern Europe. The city once again touted its openness and cosmopolitanism, but xenophobia and antiforeigner violence were one the rise. In 1996 the citizens of Brandenburg, reflecting old prejudices against Berlin, voted down an initiative to combine Brandenburg and Berlin into a single state, a measure that Mayor Eberhard Diepgen had claimed was necessary if the eastern region was to hold its own against the more powerful western states. Diepgen and other boosters spoke of Berlin as Europe’s most happening city, but forty years of division and isolation had left a durable legacy of provincialism. Even some locals had to admit that the new Berlin might be more hype than hip. As one cabaret performer put it: “Berlin is like an old woman who dyes her hair and then thinks she is beautiful.”

Prenzlauer Berg, the neighborhood in northeastern Berlin that had housed the most vibrant artistic “scene” in GDR days, developed a larger, trendier scene after the Wall came down. Western punks came over and squatted, while Kreuzberg artists and intellectuals, attracted by “the charm of the derelict,” bought spacious apartments in the district’s rundown but still-intact Wilhelmian-era Mietskaserne. Carpetbagging Wessis, along with a few entrepreneurial Ossis, opened a raft of new cafés and restaurants. The area around Kollwitzplatz was ground zero in this transformation. In the area’s new cafés, which were carefully designed to look like old cafés, young people from all over the world congregated to eat ethnic food, drink overpriced wine and beer, and feel hip.