ABSTRACT
Perhaps more than any other city, Berlin holds an iconic place in the ebb and flow of 20th-century German history. As much as it emerged as the showcase of Prussian might, the Weltstadt of Hitler’s Reich, and the zero hour of German rebuilding and Cold War confrontation, the city also represented for resident and visitor alike a space of bold cultural experimentation, illicit sexuality, and nonconformist gender practices. This chapter provides an analysis of the regulation of Berlin’s public and private spaces in order to consider what was at stake in Allied and East and West German attempts to rebuild broken social and sexual mores. By viewing the policing of social space as intrinsically connected to the quest for both social and political normalization, this chapter traces the changing valuation of established sexual zones through the cumulative effects of war, defeat, rebuilding, and division. Reading the divided city as mapping out specific experiences of desire and danger, invested with political ambiance in the context of the emerging Cold War, this chapter examines the relationship between space, place, sexuality, and identity by looking at attempts to regulate hetero- and homosocial life. In this way, it demonstrates that space not only has spatial but also particularly gendered temporal dimensions exemplified in the deep anxieties German authorities and average citizens experienced concerning the breakdown of traditional mores in the wake of war.
