Anti-fascist protective rampart built

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Skybird

You might be surprised, but many former Westberliners of my age and older think that the city was more pleasant and better off during the cold war, than it is now.

I'm not surprised at all. An unquestionable authority can get things done and make them run smoother. After all, Mussolini made the trains run on time.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

I'm not surprised at all. An unquestionable authority can get things done and make them run smoother. After all, Mussolini made the trains run on time.

That was not what it was about in W-Berlin. Thew four Allied Powers left the mayor and politicians pretty much dop what they want, except some laws in place that do not support your implication. Knifes of a certain length with fixed blades were prohibited, and the Bundeswehr was not allowed to draw in W-Berlin. Minor things like that that in normal life played no role.

As I said, for foerigners it must be difficult to understand. It compares to Feng Shui's turtle effect: always sit with a wall in your back. Security-wise it plays no role when you sit in a restaurant with or without a wall in your back. But 9 out of 10 people feel better, more "gemütlich" if they have a wall in their back (a psycho-empirical fact, btw). I too do not like to sit in a room in the middle with my back in the open, no pillar, no wall, no podium there.

It was the living style, the way of life, the overall feeling when being in W-Berlin. You were inside the castle. Inside it was cozy, and compact. You were "safe". And life was good.

Many national and international artists who lived there at that time btw also say that.

When you were a boy, were there never that situation when for fun you ran to a barn or a house over an open place, and although you were not in danger at all, somehow it felt so good, so relieved if the gate or door fell behind you, and you were inside? I cannot imagine that people can go through life without ever having had that kind of feeling.

It probably also was kind of a relief after the boring transit through the GDR on marked and closely guarded roads, the transit through Soviet garrison towns, the depressing sights, and the often chicanerous (?) final paper control at the last GDR border checkpoint (although sometimes the guards there were correct and polite, but in the majority of cases they tried to show those Westerners who was in command: by working slow, looking long and deep into your eyes, complaining about nothing, and so on.