Berlin 1970
Margy Eilbeck
Queer Lives across the Wall examines the everyday lives of queer Berliners between 1945 and 1970, tracing private and public queer life from the end of the Nazi regime through the gay and lesbian liberation movements of the 1970s.
"By telling the stories of lesbians as well as gay men, and transgender people as well as cisgender people, Rottmann paints an incredibly rich portrait of queer and trans repression and survival in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, from bars to prisons to apartments to garden cottages, and challenges how we think about queer history."
By the time West Berlin was declared the European Capital of Culture of 1988, a heavily internationalized literary scene had already been developing on both sides of the Wall. In fifteen contributions, this volume traces the literary journey taken by the front, island, and capital city to become a future metropolis by looking at numerous case studies, focusing on authors who lived or were guests in Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s.
Eva Kelley: We have the impression today that the Berlin of the late 1970s was extremely open and accepting. Yet one of the pictures that struck me in your exhibition shows Iggy Pop casually standing on the street while a couple walks behind him. The woman seems shocked at the sight of Iggy. What was that dynamic in the city really like? Did you guys stand out?
People often describe West Berlin as an island. Not just as an island in Germany but globally speaking. Celebrities felt anonymous in West Berlin for some reason. Why do you think it was like that?
It was therapeutic for me. Just realizing this was something people are actually interested in seeing, which I never thought. That was my big surprise. That people would enjoy seeing the photos. Not just the ones with Jim and David, but also Berlin, the city. Always grey, the sun never shone. I mean, there was literally not one sunny day. And then, for example the Reichstag, you could go there and there was nobody. I took these selfies in 1975 with myself at 5 oclock in the morning when nobody was there. And the bus held and nobody got on or off. It was like, why is this bus stopping? The bus would stop, wait two seconds, drive off again. There was nothing going on. You could just run around. It was a beautiful place.
Observe Berlin's history and transformation from the late 1970s through the dramatic changes of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall to the city's current state via the lens of IMAGO photographer Rolf Zllner.
In the bustling streets of cities across the world, Dimpy Bhalotia sees more than just pavement and people; she sees a theater of human connection, emotion, and fleeting moments that tell stories beyond words.
From the GDR era with its prison for a failed escape attempt to a Hollywood fairytale and an American dream: writer and columnist Jens Pepper writes about the photographer and sound editor Michael Dressel and his photographic journey.
In November 1970 Fred and Silvia Mathews founded the Black Information Center at their address in West Berlin, not far from the Schneberg City Hall where Kennedy famously declared himself a Berliner. Little is currently known about Silvia, but we know from a profile in Ebony that Fred was a quiet man who had served in the US Army in West Berlin and stayed there after being discharged. In the mid-1960s, he and his friend Moses Herrin became involved in lucrative work smuggling refugees out of East Berlin, which continued until they were caught in 1965 and spent months in East German prisons. Sometime after this Fred and Silvia married and planned the BIC.
With the help of serios [sic] minded Black men we intend to help black families in the States and Afrika [sic] with clothes and any other help. A collection will be hold [sic] every week. We will build an action committee of black men to see that this is carried out.
This is the real Checkpoint Charlie, in March 1970, on Friedrichstrasse at the corner of Zimmerstrasse. It was the only crossing point between East Berlin and West Berlin for foreigners, Allied military personnel, and diplomats. The other six checkpoints were for West Germans and/or West Berliners.
Checkpoint Charlie was removed in 1990, shortly before formal German reunification. A replica of the original building (less than half the size of this one) was rebuilt on the site in 2000, as a symbol of history and a curiosity for tourists.
Berlin has two separate public transport rail systems, the S-Bahn and U-Bahn. The S-Bahn has been operated by the national railroad since 1924, now Deutsche Bahn (DB). The U-Bahn is operated by Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG), which is owned by the city of Berlin. Lines are underground in the main part of the city. They may be are above ground or in cuttings below in street levels in the outer regions. The first lines were opened in 1902. You can see new U-Bahn lines under construction in 1970 (broken thick lines).
This map has a lot of information about the U-Bahn in the divided city, after the East German regime built the Wall in 1961. Most of the U-Bahn was in West Berlin, and many lines operated unchanged. Two lines crossed East Berlin territory, but did not stop at stations in East Berlin. One of these lines stopped at Friedrichstrasse, which was a "border crossing point." Two other lines were almost wholly in East Berlin, and were operated by BVG-Ost, the East Berlin transit agency. They are shown as narrow black lines.
I booked my hotel at Tempelhof Airport when I arrived in Berlin in 1970. Someone marked the map with my trip from the airport (Flughafen) to my hotel on Kurfrstendamm (Uhlandstrasse, left center), with two changes marked "X" at Mckernbrcke and Wittenbergplatz.
Line 3 had been truncated by the division of Berlin. The two stops between Uhlandstrasse and Wittenbergplatz was the beginning / end of my trips in Berlin. Line U3 (as it is now known) now extends to Schlesisches Tor, in the former East Berlin.
Some of the stations in East Berlin show former names in large letters, and names given by the East German regime in small letters (e.g. Walter Ulbricht Stadium). Many of the "East German" names (e.g. Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz) were retained after 1990.
Opening: November 11, 1970, place and time of the activity available on request by phone (Kthener Strasse in Berlin-Kreuzberg). A talk with Allan Kaprow took place at 9 p.m. on the same day at the gallery.
Further Information: During his time as a fellow with the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program, Allan Kaprow and a group of performers gathered for A Sweet Wall, a happening close to the border of the Berlin wall. After building a proxy wall out of cylinder blocks, bread, and jam, their wall was then collapsed by the group. Kaprow, who passed away in 2006, wrote a statement for Sweet Wall in his Activity Booklet. In this text he explains:
Allan Kaprow published many facsimiles and catalogues with detailed descriptions and photographs of happenings or, as he called them, activities, that could be re-staged by others. They similarly served as a documentation of his practice. Below you can see the catalogue for ROUTINE, from 1975, which is part of the collection Archiv der Avantgarden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.
BERLIN AFFAIR. NBC / Universal TV, 02 November 1970. Darren McGavin, Fritz Weaver, Brian Kelly, Claude Dauphin, Pascale Petit, Christian Roberts, Darren Nesbit, Kathie Browne. Teleplay by Peter Pendulik & E. Jack Neuman, basef on a story by Eliot West. Directed by David Lowell Rich. Currently streaming on YouTube (see below),
Dauphin has little to do, and Kelly is, as usual, mostly adequate as the charming Strand, while Petit is attractive certainly, but no earth shaker. That leaves most of the work to McGavin playing off Weaver in their scenes together and some decent thuggery by the reliable Darren Nesbit. A solid script (similar to, but not a copy of the plot of Funeral in Berlin) that ties the various twists and mysteries up neatly, good direction, and better cinematography than usual, plus a downbeat ending opening up room for a series to develop round it all out.
It plays as much as a private eye yarn as international intrigue. The set-up may remind you a little of a more human first season of MANNIX setting up McGavin as the sticky but vital cog in the machine.
(U) Ever since the founding of the modern German nation in 1871, scholars and diplomats have asked, "What is Germany? What are her borders?" The onslaught of the Cold War has not aided the Germans or the rest of Europe in resolving these questions. Both Germanys chose sides -- or were forced to choose sides -- and were incorporated into their respective alliance systems, thus closing the door on reunification in the post-war era. In the mid-1950s, the German Democratic Republic dropped its reunification slogans and from then on spoke only of a confederation of the two states, while the Federal Republic stated the "Hallstein Doctrine" in 1955, which considered recognition of the German Democratic Republic an "unfriendly act." By the end of the 1960s, when it became obvious the "German question" was not going to be resolved by reunification in the foreseeable future, there arose a feeling that more normal relations between the two Germanys were long overdue. This formidable task was tackled in 1969 by the Federal Republic's new Chancellor, Willy Brandt, with his Ostpolitik. The next two years were a fertile period, with a series of treaties being concluded between the Federal Republic and its eastern neighbors, and between the Four Powers on the question of Berlin.1
(U) The Federal Republic and the Soviet Union signed a treaty in 1970 in which the two sides renounced the threat or use of force and undertook to settle their disputes exclusively by peaceful means. Of interest to this study, both agreed that borders as they existed in Europe were inviolable. In a "Letter on German Unity," handed to the Soviets at the signing ceremony in Moscow, the Federal Republic declared, "that this treaty does not conflict with the political objective of the Federal Republic of Germany to work for a state of peace in Europe in which the German nation will recover its unity in free self-determination."2
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