State, Territory, and Identity Formation in the Postwar Berlins, 1945-1989

Abstract

In the moder system of nation-states, most, if not all, large human cultural groups base part of their claim to an integrated identity on residence in a territorially defined home and a culturally delineated nation (see, e.g., Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; Smith 1986). As Sahlins (1988:234-263) shows for Spain and France, at least since the early 19th century, the modern state has based its juridical definition of sovereignty on defining and enforcing its and territorial boundaries, with political control, or creation of the center, being secondary and derivative. This tie to homeland or territorially circumscribed space, on the one hand, and to a unified culture or nation, on the other, has been extremely problematic in the construction of the identities of German-speaking peoples residing in geographical units that have been called, successively, Wilhelmine Germany, Weimar Republic, Third Reich, Allied occupied territories, German Democratic Republic, and Federal Republic of Germany. Particularly troublesome for this century's Berlin residents has been the notion of Heimat (home). Both world wars resulted in shifts in physical boundaries and massive population movements. Indeed, the peculiar solution of the Allies in their 1945 Potsdam Accord was to deconstruct any semblance of the unity of culture, state, and nation: they divided the nation territorially and ideologically, displaced large parts of the population, and opened for contestation the physical boundaries of the home. Berlin became the site and symbol of this answer, which was then reinscribed in varied forms by the two new German states when they established themselves in 1949.' During the Cold War, these two statesautonomous, asymmetrical mirror images of one another-competed for legitimacy in signifying and representing the nation. They were involved in what Hegel (1953) called a to the death: seeking recognition (Anerkennung) of self without having to recognize the other in turn. Although publicly denouncing and threatening to overcome the social and territorial other, they were, in fact, intent on producing cultural difference-for the production of different nations was a precondition for their claim to legitimate statehood! This struggle was nowhere more transparent than in the divided Berlin, what I have elsewhere referred