By Nick Ward
Long before it was officially carved up on world maps between East and West, Berlin was a city divided. Jennifer Evans’ research examines the physical, social and cultural spaces the city straddled from the 1920s to the Cold War era.
Evans, a professor of history, has recently published the results of a decade of research in Life among the ruins: cityscape and sexuality in Cold War Berlin.
“Berlin hosted world renowned artists in the 1920s, had thriving jazz clubs, avant guard theatre, cutting edge modernist design, painting and architecture,” Evans said. “It was also sexually progressive as home to the Institute for Sexual Science and the first organized gay rights movement.”
All this changed when Hitler and the Nazi party rose to power in the 1930s and attempted to restore traditional gender roles and rules. Their appeal signified a public’s malaise with the pace of change. “Many people felt alienated by the new political system, changing visions of womanhood, and challenges to the traditional family.”
The pre-war Berlin bears little resemblance to the cities that would emerge 30 years later. Evans sifted through Berliners’ diaries, letters and memoirs, news coverage and police and court files to piece together how war, repressive policies and the legacy of the most liberal city in Europe impacted the private lives of the city’s citizens.
She found Nazi repression outlasted the regime itself and its impact could still be felt during the Cold War era.
“By demonstrating how postwar governments supported a similar vision of the traditional family as a salve against moral depravity, I show that the family and traditional sex and gender roles that support it are in themselves a construct that Cold War governments in Berlin worked very hard to uphold.”
Despite repression, the trauma of war and the partition of the city, the GLBT community remained undaunted. In the spirit of the Roaring 20s, clandestine gay bars were reopened and the community continued to thwart police crackdowns throughout the Cold War years.