The Berlin Wall (Part 4): From Division to Defiance (with Ryan Balmer)

Artie Mead: ‘So, hi everyone. Artie back here on another discussion episode. So today, I am joined by a fellow history buff and also a fellow tour guide here in Berlin, Ryan Balmer. Today, we’re going to discuss the next episode on the Berlin Wall series about life on each side of the Berlin Wall. So before we do that, Ryan, do you want to quickly introduce yourself for everyone?’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah. So, I’m obviously from Scotland and have been living in Berlin for about 16 years. I’ve been guiding for about 15 years, maybe full-time for about 12, I guess. And I cover a broad range of subjects, from the Nazi era to Jewish Berlin, to post-war architecture, to queer Berlin, but I also cover many of the subjects we’ll be talking about today.’

Artie Mead: ‘So, am I right in thinking this kind of topic is what you’re really passionate about?’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah, I think more than anything else in the city.’

Artie Mead: ‘Okay. Cool.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah, certainly the last, sort of, 30 or 40 years of social and cultural history is my current obsession.’

Artie Mead: ‘Nice. Well, okay. Great to have you.Yeah. So, I’ll just introduce for you guys what we’re going to be talking about. So, yeah, up until now, we talked about the Berlin crisis, which led to the Berlin Wall. Then, with Quincy, we’ve talked about the building of the Wall and its various tweaks, and additions, and generations. Then with Tina, we talked about escapes, escape attempts, and the unfortunate deaths at the Berlin Wall. Now, with Ryan, we’re going to talk about what life was like on both sides of the Wall. So, the Berlin Wall divided Berlin for 28 years, from 1961 until 1989, a period when East and West Berliners were separated from friends and family in the West. 

East Berliners and East Germans, as a whole, were put under strict surveillance throughout the 28 years whilst the Wall was up. Despite strict government control, Western culture managed to seep into the East in various ways, including music like rock and roll, hip hop, and punk, leading to early youth movements. The 1980s saw a vibrant youth culture in both East and West Berlin, with punk squats and complex relationships with the church, and that kind of really shaped the social dynamics in the East. Meanwhile, West Berlin, heavily subsidised by the U.S., became a symbol of freedom and a showcase of Western culture, attracting figures like David Bowie and Iggy Pop. 

Exemptions from military service and the allure of Western culture led many to move to West Berlin, fostering a sense of community, including the emergence of hip hop and a melting pot of different cultures through the occupying forces of the U.S., Britain, and France, and also various immigrant groups. So that’s what we’re going to be talking about in a nutshell. Maybe let’s start with people, I guess, would be more fascinated by, which is East Berlin, okay? So, the Wall goes up on the 13th of August, 1961. People are separated from family, from friends in the East because, in the East, you’re not allowed to leave, okay? 

You actually have to get specific permission from the Ministry of the Interior if you want to leave the country, okay? And obviously, that permission is very, very rarely, if ever, granted. And, you know, East Berliners and East Germans, in general, are put under this surveillance, okay? So, obviously, it felt very oppressive, didn’t it?’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Absolutely, yeah. You know, it’s not the Soviet Union, and I think it’s also very important to make that clear straight away, but it’s still a heavily surveilled state. There was way more Stasi operatives or informants per head of population in East Germany than there ever were KGB agents in the Soviet Union. So, it’s very, very closely observed.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yeah. I did some research on this, and it did say that the Stasi was the most omnipresent secret police in the Eastern Bloc.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah, I mean, if you include the 90,000 full-time employees by the time the Wall came down and about 180,000 informants, it’s about one in 65 of the population, which is, you know, enough. It’s also astonishing that a state that was on its knees economically, certainly by the early 1980s, if not slightly before, was spending a significant minority of its GDP on surveilling its own citizens, but also spying upon and sabotaging the West.’

Artie Mead: ‘Well, I mean, that’s kind of what I always tell people on my tours, is that I think that’s probably part of the reason why the GDR went bankrupt, is because it had to spend quite a bit of money because it didn’t trust its population. It had to spend quite a lot of money on spying on that population. So, yeah, it took up quite a lot of resources.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘It certainly doesn’t help.’ 

‘Yeah, certainly doesn’t help. Exactly.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yeah. I mean, I mentioned that as well, that they weren’t just spying on their own people; they were surveilling the West. And actually, this plays a really important part in their response to a very specific type of youth culture in the early sixties. Because even though the Wall was up, the Stasi still had lots of agents in the West. And there’s this infamous Rolling Stones concert in 1965. And it takes place at the Waldbühne, which is an outdoor stage right behind the Olympic Stadium, in the far west of the city. And the West Berlin youth were so excited by Mick that they just went fucking crazy, and they ripped up the seats, and there was a riot. And the story goes that there was a couple of Stasi agents within the crowd, and they stand watching this, and they go back and they report, saying, “We need to shut this down.” And what that tells you is that for it to be shut down, it has to exist. So East Germany did have a rock and roll scene. It had a small but thriving beat or rock and roll scene, which was a response to, you know, British rock and roll, like the Beatles and the Stones, but also earlier stuff like Little Richard and Chuck Berry. So it did exist, and then that shut it down.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yeah, and it’s important to remember that, yeah, like, as you said, because obviously the Wall only went up in 1961, and East Germany had existed since 1949. So, obviously, a lot of influences from the West had already seeped East anyway, before the Wall went up. It’s important to remember that. But, obviously, all this other stuff kind of seeping into the East, how would you say it kind of got through after the Wall went up?’

Ryan Balmer: ‘After the Wall went up, if you lived close enough to the Iron Curtain, or you lived anywhere in East Berlin, you were able to pick up West German radio.

Artie Mead: ‘Oh yes, by pointing your antenna at the west.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Absolutely. There were parts of the country, especially the area, I think around Dresden, that were so far away from the Iron Curtain that they couldn’t pick up West German TV or radio. And, you know, the other East Germans ridiculed them. They had a sort of nickname, which roughly translates as “the land of the clueless” or something like that, because they could only pick up East German, you know, national propaganda, basically. But if you were anywhere close to the Wall, if you’re anywhere close to the Iron Curtain, it was quite simple to pick up radio and then TV stations from the West. So there is this constant influx of broadcasting from the West. The other way was through family members. And also, that’s important to remember. For the first couple of years that the Wall was up, Westerners were not allowed in the East. It was only after Christmas 1963 that they were allowed to come, and even then they still had to get visas. And a lot of the time, they’d be put under surveillance. So it wasn’t easy, but eventually, Westerners were able to come. And so, obviously, they would sneak things in—you know, books and—’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah, they had to be very careful, obviously, because usually their possessions were heavily loops through by the East German border guards.
The other thing was that after the beginning of the 1970s, there was a shift in the dictatorship in East Germany, which goes from Walter Ulbricht, who was in power from almost the very beginning, to 20 years. And Honecker is pretty much as much of a Stalinist as Ulbricht, but—’

Artie Mead: ‘But I think he was removed because Ulbricht was wanting to stay more Stalinist.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Exactly.’

Artie Mead: ‘And because Honecker was more open to better relations with the West, that’s why the Soviets backed his leadership.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘From the end of the sixties, you’ve got this brief government with Willy Brandt in power—the first Social Democrat Chancellor—and he opens up far better diplomatic channels and relationships with the East. Both countries were still spying on each other, but it’s—there was a lot more communication, there’s better trade agreements, there’s much more access for West Germans. So what started as a trickle of West Germans visiting their families from ‘63, ends up being much more commonplace by the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s. So, it’s not just once every couple of years—it was several times a year in many cases. So, there’s this constant influx of West German people visiting their families and cousins telling other cousins about the culture that exist in the West. Culture that they were vaguely aware of, again, because of radio, because of TV. It’s—I’d say that one thing about it is that Erich Honecker’s comparative openness to West Germans visiting the East comes back to bite him on the arse because it means that increasingly, East Germans were able to get a genuine sense of what life was like in the West—one that wasn’t distorted by the lens of propaganda.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yes, exactly. So basically, this is encapsulated by the fact that Honecker, in 1978, he orders a million pairs of Levi’s jeans for East Germans in 1978. Okay? So, that shows you that, obviously, I think by then, the East German government realised that it was—I guess, in a way, they probably felt that they couldn’t stop this desire for Western consumer goods.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah, absolutely. It’s something I think which first becomes apparent to the East after the 1953 uprising, actually. And there are phases over the years where they slackened off to a certain extent, but also tightened up in others. So, during Honecker’s time, you have this superficially more modernising dictator, who’s definitely less, who’s stuck in the Stalinist past than his predecessor. But the Stasi numbers sharply rose during Honecker’s first few years as dictator. They only start to slow down in the early 80s when East Germany’s economy starts to collapse heavily. So, I mean, behind the scenes, Honecker was just as bad as Ulbricht. 

But there’s this—yeah, you could say it’s tokenistic, but it’s also a question of, you know, yeah, you can’t stop it. So you harness it, you take the credit for it. The fact that it was Levi’s, the fact that it was this, you know, iconic American brand is particularly funny because over in West Berlin from, you know, even before West Germany was founded in 49, there was a concerted effort by the American government to flood West Germany with Coca-Cola, with American movies, with American music, and American brands like Levi’s. There’s a nickname for this whole process, the Coca-Colanization. The idea was show West Berlin, show West Germany, in fact, show the whole world that our way is the better way. Our way of life, our ideology, our economics is far superior to what’s going on across the street in the East. 

Artie Mead: ‘Exactly. And I think then—vwhat is so fascinating is that, yeah, people kind of assume that in East Berlin and in East Germany that they had this kind of very grey, dull life the whole way through. And actually, especially towards the 80s, because of all of this influence they’d had from the West, including actually also, not just influence from the West, I think, to be honest, they—a lot of this stuff, they did actually get from their own experiences and their own inspirations and, you know, and that was—especially in the 80s, it was when you really had these emergencies of youth culture in the East. And I think what people, what surprises people is when, you know, if you show them a picture of punks in Berlin n the 1980s and you say, “Oh, that was at East Berlin,” a lot of people, I think, do double takes. They were like—and they’d say, like, “They had punks in East Berlin?’ And I think they—a lot of people find that hard to believe. 

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah, because, again, people very often conflate East Germany with the Soviet Union. And actually, there was some punks in the Soviet Union as well. But I think people think that, if you walked down the street in East Berlin with a mohawk and a, you know, a safety pin through your nose, you’re going to go straight to jail. And you know, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to end up in jail at some point, but it’s not quite as clear cut as that. So, the way it worked is if you began to dress in a way which alarmed the locals, the police, eventually the Stasi—’

Artie Mead: ‘And obviously, they would be put on edge by people, you know, wearing lots of like piercings and their hair in that way.

Ryan Balmer: ‘Well, there’s a really interesting continuity between the Nazi attitudes to people who were on the fringes of society. You know, the Nazis had a very specific term, which was asocial. These people who fell into that category were sent to concentration camps, forcibly wear the black triangle. And asocial could be long term unemployed people with—’

Artie Mead: ‘People who refuse to do work, right?’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah. Or who necessarily couldn’t really hold down a job because maybe mental health issues or also people who were just drunk all the time, or who people who had some sort of substance abuse issue, but also sex workers. And what’s really alarming, I think, is that that term was often used in East Germany by the locals in particular to refer to punks. So, people were using a derogatory term which was really promoted during the Nazi era to describe people who didn’t dress or perhaps behave in a way which was mainstream and acceptable. 

So yeah, you’re walking around dressing like that, you’re freaking out the locals, you’re freaking out the police, you’re eventually freaking out the Stasi. But what happens next is not immediate arrest and incarceration, it’s observation. So they’re going to take you in, you’re maybe going to get asked for your papers, your ID every day, but the questioning process is maybe going to last a few minutes, maybe a couple of hours if you get brought down to the station. But what they do is, if they see you dressing like that, they’re likely to open up a file upon you. 

So, it’s not dressing like that that will get you put in jail in East Germany. And then once you’re under surveillance, sometimes  they’ll invent some incredibly flimsy pretense to arrest you. Sometimes they will actually have grounds to arrest you, but it means that you’re on very shaky ground.’

Artie Mead: ‘Well, I mean, I guess this kind of encapsulates how, I mean, you know, at the beginning mentioning how people were put under surveillance and that was, I guess at the end of the day, what most people’s qualms about East Germany and the communist system was, was this curtailment of freedoms. Because, I mean, it’s important to stress that people did enjoy living under communism, and I meet a lot of people these days from the former East who miss communism, and it’s important to stress that. But anyway, I mean, that’s something—that’s, I think, a topic more for a series, which—’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Can I just add something? Because I think you’re right. There’s a really interesting response that some of the punks in East Germany made to one of the methods that the Stasi employed. And it tells you something about how they felt as East Germans. So what would often happen was when you were eventually arrested, sent to jail for a few months, sometimes they would offer to release you early, or at the end of your sentence, allow you to go into the West. And most of the punks who are offered that opportunity turn it down because they were East Germans. So there’s this idea that every East German was obsessed with making it to the West. These East Germans very often were not.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yeah, exactly. And actually, so I basically made a film about the GDR, about East Germany, and it was about three women and one of them is a punk and she is actually an eco activist. So she’s an environmental activist, which was actually quite common. A lot of punks were, and we did some interviews actually of people who had been punks back in the GDR. And the woman who used to be this punk back in the GDR, she said, “What we wanted—” because the punks were being subversive on purpose, but their aim was not to bring down East Germany. It was to bring down the SED. It was to bring down the communist party. Okay. Not to actually bring down East Germany. She—this woman said, “No, it was our home. We loved our home. We didn’t want to destroy our home. We just wanted to bring about the fall of this totalitarian dictatorship. But we agreed with a lot of the way the state was run. We just wanted—we want socialism, just not this socialism.” ‘

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah. Yeah.’

Artie Mead: ‘So yeah, important to stress that. Also, something that surprises people, that hip hop became quite a big thing in the GDR. And if I’m right in thinking, that came from—it got its foot in the door in the GDR with a film called Beat Street. And I think that it—I think that’s what’s kind of was the root of the hip hop movement in the GDR. But yeah, no, it was again, this—you would be kind of walking down the street and you would see a group of young people wearing tracksuits, just break dancing. And it’s—and actually, there’s a film about it from the GDR, as you know, not from the GDR, but it’s a film about the GDR and hip hop in the GDR called Dessau, Dessau Dancers. So yeah, if you want to find out more about hip hop in the GDR, that’s a film you can watch.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Well, it was going on in public. Alexanderplatz was a place where breakdancing contests would kind of spontaneously take place. What was really surprising was that it was sometimes officially organised, you know, that the free German youth, this youth organization from East Germany—’

Artie Mead: ‘Like the sort of scouts.’ 

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah. Like a communist cub scout movement, basically. And they would have all these social centres all across the country and they’d have live music sometimes, but they would also have these state sanctioned breakdancing events. Yeah, the emergence of Beat Street is interesting because it doesn’t come out of nowhere. We talked a little bit about Western music being curtailed by the East. Certainly by the end of the 70s and through the early 80s, there’s a real shift. And again, it’s Honecker still in charge. You could argue it’s part of this attempt to at least superficially appear that you’re modernizing and you’re allowing the youth more freedoms. 

So, I think Beat Street came at a time when there was already a little bit of a softening up to Western music anyway. The other thing is, star Harry Belafonte, and Belafonte has, you know, some really good leftist credentials. So he’s got a long history as being really quite far left of the civil rights movement. And for a country that was continually promoting itself as an anti fascist country, a country that has connections to struggles all across the world during the Cold War, a film that starred Belafonte, in a film which promoted this exciting culture that was predominantly, made by people of color in the U. S. as a response sometimes to racism, it ticks all the boxes for East Germany. It allowed a new type of culture to flourish in East Germany. I don’t think it had any serious political implications at that time. Not nearly as much as punk.’

Artie Mead: ‘Okay, right. Yeah, because—well, I guess because, I think they would probably argue that, I guess punks just looked more imposing, I suppose, than people just wearing tracksuits.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah, and you know, there’s a great book about East German punk called Burning Down the House. And the author, Tim Moore, writes about how people—they lived and they existed within the holes, within the cracks, within the system, within the regime. East Germany wanted to be a totalitarian system. But it didn’t really have the resources, especially towards the end. So, there are these cracks that open up and it’s within these cracks that these subcultures and these countercultures began to flourish. So, you could avoid being given a shitty job you didn’t want by just, basically living off of what you made. Like those guys making clothes, making jewelry, you could—

Artie Mead: ‘Being self sufficient.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Self sufficient, you could—and also, you could squat, which is something which—

Artie Mead: ‘Again, surprises people that happened in East Berlin, because also it’s important to remember in East Germany, there was no such thing as homelessness.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘But what there was a surplus of housing. And that’s the thing, there’s really two different types of squatting. There’s moving into a house, which is deemed to be livable, but the official occupant has moved out or died. So there’s a lot of cases of young punks living with their grandmothers or whatever, the grandmother passes away, and then, the young people just continue to live there. They get their friends in, it becomes a place where they live, where they party, where they create. But the other form of squatting was literally moving into abandoned buildings. And the best place in Berlin for that was Prenzlauer Berg, arguably, because it was really central, so it’s quite convenient for people.

It was really close to many of the churches where some of the first punk concerts were played actually in East Germany. But it was also full of crumbling, but still reasonably intact tenement buildings that were not really earmarked for renovation by the East German state, but pretty much just neglected. So, again, it’s cracks, it’s holes in the system that open up. Apartments that were a bit too shabby, for most people, who would rather live in one of the platen bowels that they built instead. So you’ve got dozens and dozens of squats all across  Prenzlauer Berg, which, you know, I think many people would find difficult to believe these days.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yes. No, that’s true. And I think—no, but that is actually super interesting because people just don’t think of it as something that happened, but I guess it’s something that kind of goes hand in hand with the punk movement.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah, absolutely. You know, it’s a way of existing outwith the system. 

Artie Mead: ‘Yes, exactly.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘You know, you find a place to live where you’re not constantly monitored, you find a job where you make a job for yourself, where you’re not—you don’t have to report to a person every day. It’s some way of just existing in the fringes. And it’s incredible and it’s incredibly brave how many East German people managed to do that. West Berlin obviously had a thriving punk scene as well. It’s one thing being a punk in West Berlin, but it’s another in the East.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yes, when you’ve got all of this stuff going against you.

Ryan Balmer: ‘Much more radical, much braver and much more, for want of a better word, revolutionary than anything that’s going on in West Berlin.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yeah, totally agree. But what’s funny and also what surprises people, is that these punks eventually ended up actually having quite a close relationship with the church, didn’t they? Do you want to maybe explain a little bit about that? Because, obviously, it’s important to remember the churches in the GDR in communist countries, they were always quite suspicious of churches. So I guess that’s what those two things had in common.,

Ryan Balmer: ‘I’ll go back to something I said near the beginning, which is, this is not the Soviet Union we’re talking about. So the Soviet Union has a much, much harsher impact on the Christian Church.’

Artie Mead: ‘They’re a lot stricter?’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Much stricter. Absolutely. They were much stricter on the Jewish community as well, actually. But East Germany, when it came to Judaism and Christianity, had a much more hands off approach than the Soviets ever did. So you could still go to church, still go to synagogue. There was a couple left in East Berlin, actually. None of these things are encouraged, but—and you are very, you know, you’re heavily surveilled if you do that, especially if your faith compels you to speak out against the state. But if you are not doing that, if you are just going to church on a Sunday, keeping your mouth shut, going on about your business, you’re largely going to be left alone. 

You’re not going to get a great job and your kids are not going to get a great job. Definitely, basically, second class citizens. But there is still this freedom, which is much greater than it would have been in the Soviet Union. One of the freedoms was that some churches were able to put on cultural events. They had youth groups connected to the church and they would often have these spaces in which they would organize live music for the young. And that live music was predominantly, kind of, fairly the safe end of rock music, folk, things like that. Well, what it meant was that you didn’t necessarily expressly have to have permission for all the bands who were playing there. 

Now, if you were a punk band in East Berlin and you wanted to put on a concert somewhere, legally at that point, that was pretty much your only option. So you start to get these lay people connected to the church, for the most part. Deacons connected to protestant churches who start to bring in some of these early punk bands and they allow them to play fourth or fifth on the bill below these much more conventional—’

Artie Mead: ‘Am I right in thinking that in the GDR, they’re not quite so, obviously, as repressive against churches and they kind of let churches do what they want in, like, on their property, as long as they’re kind of not, like, forcing it, like—’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah, they’d let them do what they wanted and—’

Artie Mead: ‘They tolerate them.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah. It’s somewhere between tolerance and acceptance, but yeah, absolutely. They also surveilled the hell out of these places. So in every youth group, in every church in East Germany, there’s going to be at least one person who’s reporting to the Stasi. The other issue is, is that in many of the really important punk bands in East Berlin or East Germany, you also had members who were working with the Stasi. It was one of the bigger bands, Die Firma, the bassist was a Stasi operative. She was informing upon her bandmates and other bands. So when we talk about tolerance and acceptance, again, it’s more accepted than it is in the Soviet Union, but it’s still very heavily infiltrated and surveilled and stepped on whenever it gets too out of line. So there was a certain amount of wiggle room possible in these institutions, in these churches, but they never let it go far. But that’s where it starts, many of these bands playing their first concerts in these semi officially sanctioned church events.’

Artie Mead: ‘Okay. And then that’s obviously where—because you have all of these, I guess you could say, subversive elements meeting under one roof, that is, I guess, where you could say where the movement to bring down the SED really kind of, I guess you could say where it begins in a way.

Ryan Balmer: ‘That’s definitely an argument. Yeah. I think it comes from a hundred different sources, but I think you would be hard pushed to find many more important sources or impactful sources than that. And as you say, it’s not just a bunch of punks, it’s a bunch of punks finding common cause with peaceful Christian activists. There’s an overlap between those two groups and the environmentalist movement. There’s a burgeoning kind of underground queer scene in East Germany, East Berlin at least, and all these different movements, you know, they interact, they intersect into this Venn diagram, which all agrees that something has to change. As you correctly said earlier on, it’s not necessarily the fall of the wall they’re demanding. It’s reform. It’s change. So, definitely, the intersection between all these different groups and individuals right through the eighties is one of the main reasons you end up with these huge protests all across the country in 1880.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yeah. And that’s—it’s all super interesting in the East, but—and that’s eventually what it comes to, but obviously, we’ve got another episode where we are going to talk about the fall of the wall, and by extension, the fall of the GDR and reunification. So, I guess now, let’s head over to West Berlin. Now West Berlin, it’s important to remember, because I think a lot of people get quite confused about West Berlin, because I think a lot of people think that West Berlin was actually a part of West Germany. It wasn’t. Okay. It was actually its own little kind of enclave. Okay. Unlike West Germany, West Berlin was actually fully occupied by the Western allies, so the US Britain and France, until reunifications until 1990, those three powers were actually the supreme, kind of, executive authority in West Berlin, unlike West Germany, where in 1949, the federal government took over the powers from the occupying forces, Western forces. 

And so, West Berlin was actually—because also West Berlin wasn’t even technically wasn’t actually attached to West Germany. It was all the way in East Germany. And it was like this kind of its own little island. And, yeah. So, it was this kind of weird political enclave. And I think that’s why people sometimes get confused because I think they still think that West Berlin was attached to West Germany somehow, but it wasn’t. So, I guess that’s kind of where all the sort of peculiarities, let’s say, about West Berlin started. Is the fact that it was this place that was politically actually cut off from West Germany, and it was its own little thing, I guess you could say. I guess where we’d start in West Berlin is obviously at the end of the war when you had the arrival of the occupying powers, who obviously bring over their families and all of this kind of stuff. So I guess, first of all, those are the first influences, are them bringing over the influences from their countries, I suppose.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah. I mean, the size of the The U. S. forces in West Berlin, I’d say, were big enough to be impactful on the youth of West Berlin, but I think it was more the media they brought with them. So, years ago, I remember reading this explanation about hip hop and graffiti in West Berlin, for example, and what I read was that it was these kids bringing over, you know, their sketchbooks, the children of GI’s who were here for a couple of years, and they were bringing with them mixtapes. I think that was definitely happening. And I’ve spoken to people who were in the West Berlin hip hop scene who said that was true, but it was also the radio stations being played for the—you know,  from the very, very early days, there was music that was played, not necessarily for the people of West Berlin, but for the GI’s themselves. 

So, there’s a great novel by Ian McEwen called “Innocence” and it’s set in the 1950s in occupied West Berlin. And the protagonist is this really stuffy technician from London. And he’s posted to West Berlin and he’s, at first, he’s kind of disgusted by the Western or the American radio stations. Because they’re playing this really fast, really boisterous rock and roll and he’s horrified by it. And then at one point, he goes home for Christmas back to London and he hears the radio stations there and they’re playing just the most boring, the most stayed traditional music, and he realizes he misses it. He realizes he misses this incredibly exciting US youth culture. So there’s this thing that you can make a very strong argument that West Berlin youth, West German youth, perhaps, were exposed to U. S. youth and subcultures through radio stations in particular earlier than people in London, earlier than people in Paris. So it means that from the very beginning, whether it was a deliberate long term plan or not, you have this influx of U.S. culture.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yes, exactly. And I think that’s something to remember, is that the US, I think, viewed West Berlin as a window shop for Western values. So, they poured a lot of money into it. So, West Berlin never really had to worry about money because it got so much money from the Americans. And so, gave a lot of subsidies to West Berlin. And I guess through this, obviously a lot of the things that came attached to that were its cultural hegemony.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah. And the cultural hegemony that we think of now wasn’t entirely clear after World War II at first. One of the things that really defines the early years of the Cold War is this massive cultural imbalance between the Soviets and the United States. And it’s not—the imbalance is not the way that most people would imagine. Post war—the American government, or elements within the government, had a real inferiority complex when it came to American art, because at that point, America was not really seen as a serious country, certainly by the Soviets. Despite the Soviet crackdown, the Bolshevik crackdown on many forms of art, of course, from the revolution onwards, the Soviet Union, or at least Russia was still a country that was heavily associated with high art. Not just a painting, but the ballet, the literature of the late 19th century. America had nothing compared to this. That was the idea. And this was not just something that the Soviets said, it’s something that the Americans felt. Now, if you look closely enough, there is a lot of really exciting stuff emerging from the U. S. even before the war, like John Dos Passos, there is still this sense that America has to try harder if they want to win the Cold War culturally. So what you have is this, from Eisenhower, certainly onwards, this attempt to flood the western world with US culture. Now, whether that’s, you know, James Dean movies or it’s Jackson Pollock paintings, but it’s this concerted effort by the US to flood the world with proof that America is not only the land of opportunity and the land of plenty, but it’s also a serious country.’

Artie Mead: ‘And the leader of the free world.’ 

Ryan Balmer: ‘Leader of the free world, but also a serious country that is producing high art like jazz and like abstract expressions. So whether it’s through GI radio, whether it’s through the GI’s kids or whether it’s through this deliberate effort to promote U. S. culture, both high and low, what you have in West Berlin is this contained, almost petri dish of American culture, which thrives and mutates and interacts in very different ways with with the people living in the city.’ 

Artie Mead: ‘Yes, exactly. And is an example of their, I suppose, well, their soft power. 

Ryan Balmer: ‘Exactly.’ 

Artie Mead: ‘So making people want to emulate the U.S. culture and way of being, not because they’re of military might, but because of the attractiveness of it, I guess that’s what you could call it.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Well you could also, if you want to take it back to the beginning of the Cold War, let’s for argument’s sake say that’s the the end of the Berlin blockade, what the Berlin airlift gives the allies, not the French because they don’t help out for some reason, but what especially gives the Americans is the, let’s see, 20 years of goodwill. Right? So there was a little bit of this kind of animosity or resentment about the Yankee occupier, basically, for the first few years after the war. After the airlift, that just evaporates. Because wherever you stand on the cold war, the airlift was an astonishing thing. And it also involved quite a lot of sacrifice. There was pilots died, there was ground crew died from the US, from the UK. And that’s an amazing piece of propaganda. So I think until you get this new generation of West Germans, who come of age in the mid 60s to the late 60s, who don’t feel that sense of gratitude to the US, you’ve got this incredible period of goodwill.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yes. And why—what do you think it is that made West Berlin so particular? Obviously, being this kind of island, I think it did have this big psychological effect. And I think, really, obviously, because it was like this island in the middle of East Germany, no one wanted to live there. So obviously, in order to make people live there, the West German government had to say, okay, if you— because it’s important to remember that until 2011, West Germany—well, sorry, Germany had military conscription. So, young men had to do two years of military service, which fucking sucks, by the way.’ 

Ryan Balmer: ‘Well, you can choose civil service.’ 

Artie Mead: ‘Or civil service, that’s it. Yeah, yeah.’ 

Ryan Balmer: ‘Which sucked a bit less.’ 

Artie Mead: ‘And, side note, the German—actually, no, the opposition here in Germany is now thinking about reintroducing it if they win power. I don’t really know how, what would be more of a vote loser for Gen Z, but anyway. So basically, what the West German government says is, okay, because obviously West, there’s no one really living in West Berlin and no one really wants to live in West Berlin because it’s like this enclave in the middle of East Germany. They say, okay, if you move that, you don’t have to do two years of military service or civil service, or whatever it is. So, I guess, from that, it’s important to then think about what kinds of people would then move there. 

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah, absolutely.’ 

Artie Mead: ‘Obviously, the people that moved there were obviously people who were usually against war, probably most likely left leaning. What else? Anti fascists. artists, you know, and so that is what kind of started this sort of melting pot that West Berlin became.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah, I mean, it attracts people who, for a variety of reasons, don’t want to do military service or think that there’s something about them would not be be fitting to military service. So people run away from it. They run to West Berlin because they think that their politics or their lifestyle, or in many cases, their sexuality is not really going to be fitting into the West German military. Again, your Berlin has a long history of being reasonably progressive when it comes to queer communities, queer individuals. That’s completely snuffed out by the Nazis, of course, in ‘33, but there is this resurrection of it in the West, certainly partly because of this loophole of avoiding military service. Beyond that, yeah, as you say, it’s people who think that politically, military is not for them. So, it’s left leading people—it’s a lot of artists as well. There’s an opportunity for artists in West Berlin, which is really cheap space.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yes. And because no one wants to live there, obviously, unlike now in Berlin, rents are super cheap. I mean, to be honest, if I could go back to one time in history, it would probably be eighties West Berlin or nineties Berlin .

Ryan Balmer: ‘Well, that’s, I guess that’s the question we have to discuss at the end. You know, what’s—if you had to, what would it be? Cause I can never make up my mind. I think early nineties Berlin is probably where I’d go, but I’d say, yeah, maybe the mid sixties and West Berlin would be a second, close second.

Artie Mead: ‘Yeah. And obviously, a lot of people know—you know, one of these artistic types that was attracted by Berlin, obviously, someone who didn’t have to get out of German military service because he was British, but was David Bowie, who moved here in the 1980s. I read somewhere, I don’t know if this is true, but apparently he moved because he was a heroin addict and he wanted to move somewhere where he wouldn’t be quite so tempted.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘It’s—you’re half right. He moves in 77 actually, but yeah, so he’s here for about, I mean, he’s not here as much as people think, but he’s here off and on for about three and a half years, which is a life changing period, which we’ll come to, but it was actually cocaine he was addicted to.

Artie Mead: ‘Oh, okay.’ 

Ryan Balmer: ‘And he was living in LA for a couple of years and he makes “Station”, which is one of his best albums, and that’s the first album he starts to really kind of flirt with this Vimar aesthetic, and he can’t remember recording it because he was, yeah. At one point, he believes that his swimming pool was possessed by a demon.

Artie Mead: ‘Sounds fun.’ 

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah. And he’s also—he’s been hanging out with Iggy Pop. And Iggy Pop has also got some addiction related mental health issues. So yeah, they make this escape plan. Bowie makes some connections in West Berlin and he eventually takes Iggy with him. But yeah, Bowie literally says later on that they ran away from their cocaine addictions by moving to the smack capital of Europe. And he said, in all honesty, he said he didn’t know. He said it was a genuine surprise when he got here and found that heroin was just rife.’ 

Artie Mead: ‘I mean, so the thing is, is that Boyd does clean himself up here. I think he definitely still had a good time, but it’s one of the most productive periods of his life. He has three of his best albums. He produces two figgy pop. He goes on, I think, two world tours. He makes a couple of movies when he’s here. So it’s just an astonishingly successful period of his career. The impact it has on West Berlin is really interesting as well, because despite this stream of artists and free thinkers and radicals, certainly in the 1970s, the late 1970s, West Berlin did not have a good reputation across the rest of the country. 

There was thriving music and art scenes in cities like Munich, Frankfurt. West Berlin was seen as a bit of a cultural backwater. It was seen by many as just too dark, too oppressive. Partly because it was so isolated. Mostly because it was so isolated. And there was a real sense that if you chose to move to West Berlin, you were moving somewhere which was the most, you know, potentially temporary city in the Western world. If the Cold War had intensified, West Berlin would have been taken in about five minutes. So—’

Artie Mead: ‘Living in West Berlin, you would feel quite almost forgotten about.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah. I mean, it goes back. If you want to look at the Kennedy speech at ‘63, the reason that Kennedy has to come to West Berlin and give a speech in front of hundreds of thousands of people is because people were terrified. They genuinely felt—and rumors began to spread that something was going to happen in the West, whether it was the allies of the West German state, would come to the conclusion that West Berlin wasn’t worth the trouble. And maybe it’s the best thing if it just gets absorbed by the East, give people a chance to get out, give them the choice. But then, if you continue with the situation, you might end up with World War III.’

Artie Mead: ‘Exactly.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘So Kennedy coming here and basically saying, you know, we’re not going to abandon you. This city is a beacon of democracy. You know, it means a lot to them.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yeah. Even just that line, the famous line, Ich bin ein Berliner, but he’s saying, you know, the sentiment is not lost on West Berliners. Very, very important moment for them. And because it’s basically saying you guys are doing great. What you guys stand for is what we’re fighting for. So, I guess, that’s—it was a very important moment. And, obviously, you had a lot of hip hop influence, which obviously came from the Americans, and, obviously, lots of street art, which I guess you could say Berlin is really famous for now. That, I guess, kind of really started in the 80s. 

But it’s important to remember that also, it’s not just from this western perspective that we had loads of influences, Berlin has also been West Berlin specifically was influenced by loads of different cultures that came. Specifically, obviously the one especially in Kreuzberg, that is most noticeable is the Turkish community. And that’s the thing about West Berlin, is that West Berlin, I think, then eventually became this real, yeah, melting pot of different cultures. It wasn’t just all of these things just from the West.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah, I mean, the Turkish community’s relationship with hip hop is quite complex. You’ve got this community that’s invited over to help—’

Artie Mead: ‘Rebuild the country.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Rebuild the cities, you know, work in mines, do very often low paid work. In Berlin, there was a lot of Turkish women who are working in textile factories and stuff like that. And you know, the clue is in the name of that community, the gas star by our community, the guest workers, because the West German state never, expected them or never certainly wanted them to stay.’

Artie Mead: ‘To stay. Yeah.’ 

Ryan Balmer: ‘And they weren’t the first ones. There was Greeks and Italians in the fifties. They would later on be Yugoslavians as well, and many others. But the Turkish community arguably stick around in larger numbers because they were very often running away or avoiding the poverty of the Turkish countrysides. We get a community that’s not generally from the big cities. We get a community that we’re running away from poverty, very often running away from different types of poverty cultural oppression as well. About one third of Berlin’s Turkish German community is of Kurdish ancestry. 

So it’s quite a complex community, but in any case, when they decide to stick around or when they end up finding themselves sticking around a bit longer than they planned, or the West German state ever hoped, you start to get this friction between the West German state, the West German media very often, and the Turkish community. So there is, you know, anything but encouragement for these people to stay, for them to send their children to German schools. And there’s some really shameful shit later on the late 70s, the West German state were paying families like a kind of tokenistic amount of Deutschmarks to leave. 

You literally got a certain amount of Deutschmarks per child that you took with you. But for the Turkish German community who stuck around, there starts to be this real affinity with a new form of U. S. youth culture, which emerges at the very, very end of the 70s or very start of the 80s, depending on your metric, and that was hip hop. It was hip hop, which wasn’t always political, but some of it was, and some of it was written by young, understandably justifiably furious african american men and women, who felt that despite what their government told them, they were not equal citizens. That socially, economically, culturally, they were categorized as inferior in some way. 

And there’s not an exact analogy between the situation of African-Americans in the 80s and the Turkish German community, but you can see there is an overlap. There’s an affinity there. There’s a huge difference between your ancestors being brought across in slave ships and your ancestors being invited. But you can still see this affinity. Turkish-German youth in the early eighties lapped up hip hop because some of the lyrics could be quite easily transposed to their own situation, describe their own situation living in West Berlin. And they began to write their own lyrics. They began to write lyrics in Turkish.’

Artie Mead: ‘Okay, cool.’ 

Ryan Balmer: ‘So there’s, you know, when we talk about Turkish hip hop, Turkish hip hop is almost entirely from Germany. There is a very, very small worldc

Artie Mead: ‘Well, until today, like a lot of the most famous German rappers are Turkish-German.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah, I mean, Kool Savas is definitely one of the biggest. And he was born and raised in Germany. He raps predominantly in German, sometimes English. But the early 80s, the Turkish hip hop scene in West Berlin was very often rapping in Turkish. The thing is that they weren’t also just copying the American sound, there was also this great influence from arabesque, traditional Turkish kind of musical genre, musical sound. So you’ve got this really interesting collision between Turkish music and US hip hop culture. And it was a massive scene. And I think that also explains something that you mentioned, this explosion of, not really street art at the time, but graffiti. 

Because very often, Turkish Kids living in West Berlin who were interested in rap were also interested in the other pillars of hip hop and that was breakdancing and it was graffiti. So a lot of the big West Berlin crews in the early 80s, mid 80s, were were at least partly Turkish.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yeah. No. And that’s really nice to hear because it shows you the melting pot that West Berlin—well, I mean, specifically I think Kreuzberg. Kreuzberg really was at the forefront of that and it wasn’t just with those different communities. It was also—Kreuzberg was known as probably the most left wing area of West Berlin. This is kind of really where you had the first of May demonstrations that in Berlin became a sort of tradition of anarchists and communists for really kind of raging against a system that they didn’t agree with. And that in Berlin became—I believe that started in West Berlin, didn’t it? Or did it start in the 90s?’

Ryan Balmer: ‘The 1st of May?’

Artie Mead: ‘Like, 1st of May, as in becoming as iconic in Berlin as it was.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Well, the 1st of May goes back a long, long time.’

Artie Mead: ‘No, no, I know that. I know that. But you know how Berlin, it’s a very, kind of—the celebration of it. I think before, it was definitely more of a protest. It’s now kind of more a celebration.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Sure. But it also—I mean, not to go too far back, but it does have a very specific history of violence from the state or state actors. So in the twenties and early thirties, there was quite a lot of violence between communist groups, trade union groups, and very often the Berlin police. So if you’re looking for a sort of a precedent, there definitely is one. And post war, you’ve got groups in both East and West Germany harnessing the 1st of May. So every communist country.’ 

Artie Mead: ‘Although in East Germany, it’s obviously really official.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Absolutely.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yeah’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Just like it was in other Eastern Bloc countries, also was in Yugoslavia. It’s a day off. It’s a worker’s day. It’s a mixture of celebration of, you know, acknowledgement of the people who built these communist countries or these socialist countries in the first place. So yeah, in West Berlin, it took on a slightly different bent, which was protests, celebration, and eventually a certain degree of rioting.

Artie Mead: ‘Yes, exactly.’ 

Ryan Balmer: ‘Right through the 80s.’

Artie Mead: ‘But it often became quite aggressive, didn’t it?’

Ryan Balmer: ‘It very often became aggressive because of the response of the West Berlin police. I mean, the most famous, I think the most damaging 1st of May is the 1987 one when there’s a very heavy handed response to the protest by the West Berlin police. There’s a couple of vans, police vans that were overturned by protesters. There’s an incredibly violent reaction and there’s a handful of protesters who were killed by the police. There’s, I think there’s seven people killed eventually. And there’s also a huge amount of looting and destruction. So the thing is, is that, you know, for the West Berlin left and for the Kreuzberg left, looting local businesses was seen as anathema to the first of May. 

So that’s one thing, throwing a few bricks at the police, but you know, looting a local business is—that’s something that I think most of the left would disagree with. So ever since then, you have this attempt by different grassroots groups, local politicians and, yeah, the police sometimes to try and find some kind of middle ground between the party, the protest and ideally not the riots. But the first few years I lived here, there was still a great deal of rioting went on.’ 

Artie Mead: ‘Yeah. God, I can imagine it was probably very different to how it is today.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah, it definitely has a long history going back to even the pre war era. But these days, as you saw this year, it’s predominantly peaceful.’

Artie Mead: ‘Peaceful and lots of music, and people just sort of having a good time really.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘It’s more of a party than anything.’ 

Artie Mead: ‘More of a party. Yeah. And the place where it gets kind of slightly violent is actually just outside my window on Oranienstraße. But even then, it’s nowhere near as violent as it used to be. I mean, I remember in the first years I moved to Berlin, people were still burning cars. That doesn’t happen so much anymore. I did actually see a burnt out car last week.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah, I saw a couple after May Day. There was quite a lot burnt four years ago. I just left Kreuzberg about two weeks ago, actually. But about four years ago, there was an eviction of what they call a Wagenplatz, which is like a bunch of trailers and shots parked usually illegally on some sort of empty land. And there’s a really famous one called the Køpi. Køpi was forcibly evicted on the wagon plots area was, and there was unsurprisingly a massive reaction from the left. And that involved quite a lot of damage, a couple of dozen cars that were burnt out in my neighbourhood. So it still goes on. It just doesn’t happen—’

Artie Mead: ‘Oh. Køpi out there?’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah. So the Køpi squat is still there. The building is still occupied.’

Artie Mead: ‘Oh, okay.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘It could be used to also be a Wagenplatz. So right alongside it, the Wagenplatz was totally evicted, but the building was not.’

Artie Mead: ‘Oh, okay.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘But when I first moved here, these evictions were taking place every few weeks.’

Artie Mead: ‘Oh, really?’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Especially from places up in Friedrichshain actually. I think the only thing I’d add is that, you know, when we talk about these periods, there’s a tendency to kind of lapse into nostalgia. And I think every Berliner, or every, let’s say, new Berliner, whether it’s 16 years myself or seven years for Artie, there is a tendency to wish you were in Berlin at a different point in its history. And I wish I could see these eras, I wish I could see Berlin in the seventies or Berlin in the 1990s. But I think we are still living in the afterglow of all these periods and what you have is a unique access in the city to every form of subculture and counterculture that’s existed in the last 50 or 100 years. I think it’s almost unparalleled in any city across the world. So—’

Artie Mead: ‘Very nicely put.’

Ryan Balmer: ‘Yeah. Nostalgia is important and I think it’s good to look back, but I think that it’s still an incredible city to live in.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yes. And I would say—and obviously, because the Berlin wall, despite the fact that it was a pretty traumatic time for a lot of people, pretty traumatic 28 years, and it was a symbol of division, but it does almost make me a bit glad in this way because it’s made the city like this. It’s had such an effect.’ 

Ryan Balmer: ‘That’s always the question, you know. That’s the final thing. The big question is, is Berlin so fun? Is Berlin so creative? Have all these incredible things happened despite its history or because of its history. And it’s, you know, the answer is somewhere in the middle.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yes.’ 

Ryan Balmer: ‘But again, it’s the opening up of space, the relative affordability for much of its recent history. All of these things are here for, they came out of bad reasons. They came out of bad periods in the city’s history. And I think that making the city so comparatively progressive and free thinking and creative is the best way of getting past the city’s dark history.’

Artie Mead: ‘Yeah, exactly. Very nicely put, Ryan. Cool. Okay, well guys, I hope you enjoyed that episode. Thank you very much for listening or watching, if you’re watching on YouTube. And yeah, we’ll see you in the next episode, which is the final episode of the Berlin Wall series, in which we will be talking about the fall of the wall and its effect on Germany. So thank you very much for listening. Ryan, say goodbye.’ 

Ryan Balmer: ‘Goodbye.’

Artie Mead: ‘And yeah, we’ll see you again very soon. Thank you guys. Bye.’