Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 76e91
lable at ScienceDirectContents lists avaiJournal of Historical Geography
journal homepage: www.elsevier .com/locate/ jhgIdentities in transit: the (re)connections and (re)brandings of Berlin's
municipal railway infrastructure after 1989
Samuel Merrill a, b, *
a The Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, UK
b The Center for Metropolitan Studies, Technische Universita€t Berlin, Germanya r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 5 February 2015
Received in revised form
3 July 2015
Accepted 5 July 2015
Keywords:
Infrastructure as landscape
Cultural identities
Municipal railways
Berlin
German unification* The Institute of Modern Languages Research, Sch
versity of London, Senate House, Malet Street, Londo
E-mail address: samuel.merrill@sas.ac.uk.
1 M. Hall, Identity, memory and countermemory:
landscape, Journal of Material Culture 11 (2006) 189e
2 See F. Driver and D. Gilbert (Eds), Imperial Cities: L
Manchester, 1999; C. Boyer, The City of Collective Mem
Architectural Entertainments, Cambridge, MA, 1999.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2015.07.002
0305-7488/© 2015 The Author. Published by Elsevier La b s t r a c t
This article analyses urban railway infrastructures as landscapes in order to reveal their role as con-
structions and constructors of collective and individual identities. It does this by introducing the notion
of 'identities in transit', a rhetorical category that problematises the tendency to consider the nexus of
urban infrastructure and identity formation only during discrete moments and in relation to abstract
subjectivities. Specifically, it explores the (re)connections and (re)brandings that Berlin's municipal
railway infrastructure, the Stadtschnellbahn (S-Bahn) and Untergrundbahn (U-Bahn), experienced in the
years surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall, and considers their contribution to the formation of post-
unification municipal identities. These discussions are historicised and contextualised by an account of
the consequences of Berlin's Cold War division on its transport infrastructure. The article then considers
the subsequent impact of the city's reunification and how the S- and U-Bahn became a means of con-
structing more unified municipal identities. It considers the process by which Berlin's municipal railway
networks were reconnected after November 1989 and frames this process as a metaphor for both the
different durations and protracted process of the city's reunification and the identities these gave rise to.
Thereafter, the article argues that the rebranding strategy pursued by one of the city's municipal
transport authorities provides one of the earliest examples of an attempt to manufacture a unified
identity for the New Berlin. The article highlights that while processes at the municipal level emphasised
the unification of collective identities, experiences of the infrastructures themselves often involved
persisting divides and forms of subversion and social conflict that highlighted the meeting of more
diverse individual identities.
© 2015 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND
license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).Urban landscapes are not only expressions of collective identi-
ties, they also shape the individual identities of those who inhabit
them.1 However, geographers who have investigated this duality
have mostly focused their attention on the production of national
identities, and landscapes created with, or retrospectively assigned,
the task of social remembrance:memorials, monuments, museums,
public architecture and heritage sites.2 Only recently haveool of Advanced Study, Uni-
n WC1E 7HU, UK.
the archaeology of an urban
209.
andscape, Display and Identity,
ory: Its Historical Imagery and
td. This is an open access article ugeographers begun to consider the role thatmore taken-for-granted
urban environments, such as transport infrastructures, play in the
construction of identities. These efforts remain piecemeal and often
over-stress how infrastructural projects produce identities at the
point of their construction or initial encounter. They can also fail to
respect the inextricably connected nature of social and personal
identities, conceiving these as static, and sometimes ignoring in-
termediate levels of analysis by emphasising macro and national or
micro and individual frames of identity over the meso frames pro-
vided by, for example, specific urban contexts.
This article seeks to address these issues by outlining how
Berlin's interconnected municipal railway networks, the Stadtsch-
nellbahn (S-Bahn) and Untergrundbahn (U-Bahn), have acted as
constructions and constructors of collective and individual identi-
ties since 1945, with a primary focus on the years immediatelynder the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
S. Merrill / Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 76e91 77
9 S. Merrill, Excavating Buried Memories: Mnemonic Production in the Railwayssurrounding German uni cation.3fi It does this by recounting the
production of various ‘identities in transit’ e a rhetorical category
that pertains to a particular urban context, namely public transport
networks, and specifically acknowledges the changes to Berlin's
identities that were caused by the broader geopolitical shifts of the
second half of the twentieth century, but are arguably still playing
out today. Thus, this article aligns itself with a non-essentialist
approach to identity formation by respecting Tilley's evocative
conception of identities as ‘transient, a reflection on where you are
now, a fleeting moment in a biography of the self or the group, only
partially connected towhere youmight have come from, andwhere
you might be going.’4 It carries out its task by approaching ‘infra-
structure as landscape’ e a medium of collective identity formation
composed of physical, representational and experiential elements,
across and between which the construction of individual identities
can be traced. It begins with a review of the literature that ad-
dresses the relationship of infrastructure and landscape, volumetric
geographies and urbanisms, as well as identity construction in
Germany, and in Berlin more particularly. Thereafter, an account of
the Cold War division of Berlin's transport infrastructure is pro-
vided. Then the process by which Berlin's municipal railway net-
works were (re)connected after November 1989 is considered and
framed as a metaphor for both the different durations of the city's
reunification and the identities these gave rise to. The article then
explores how the (re)branding strategies pursued by the city's
transport authorities in the same period were an early attempt to
manufacture a unified identity for the New Berlin, but one which
masked the negative aspects of the networks that indexed other
competing identities.
Landscape, infrastructure, and identity
In 1984 Jackson described landscape as the ‘infrastructure or
background for our collective existence’, but only following the
growth of an interdisciplinary academic interest in the networked
society have the productive compatibilities of landscape and
infrastructure gained significant scholarly recognition.5 At least
two distinct clusters of academic research reflect this. One em-
phasises how infrastructural sites relating to environmentally
damaging industries can become sustainable landscapes.6 This
cluster frames ‘landscape as infrastructure’ and as ‘a sophisticated,
instrumental system of essential resources, services, and agents
that generate and support urban economies.’7 The other, which is
partly built on the criticism of the first cluster's failure to account
for the social production of nature, instead considers ‘infrastructure
as landscape’, with landscape regularly conceived, either implicitly3 ‘Unification’ best describes the creation of a new German national political and
geographical entity after 1989 while ‘reunification’ resonates more strongly with
the processes that reconstituted the city of Berlin. See M. Blacksell, Partition, die
Wende, and German unification, Applied Geography 17 (1997) 257e265.
4 C. Tilley, Introduction: identity, place, landscape and heritage, Journal of Ma-
terial Culture 11 (2006) 9.
5 J.B. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, New Haven, 1984, 8; See M.
Kaika and E. Swyngedouw, Fetishizing the modern city: the phantasmagoria of
urban technological networks, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
24 (2000) 120e138; S. Graham and S. Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked
Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition, London, 2001.
6 See C. Waldheim (Ed), The Landscape Urbanism Reader, New York, 2006; M.
Mostafavi and G. Doherty (Eds), Ecological Urbanism, Baden, 2010.
7 P. Belanger, Landscape as infrastructure, Landscape Journal 28 (2009) 79.
8 M. Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, Cambridge, MA
and London, 2003, 10; H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford, 1991; see also S.
Robertson, Visions of urban mobility: the Westway, London, England, Cultural Ge-
ographies 14 (2007) 74e91. For further critiques of the ‘landscape as infrastructure’
approach, see P. Rawes (Ed), Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature
and Subjectivity, New York, 2013.or explicitly, in terms of Lefebvre's tripartite model for the social
production of space.8 This reflects how Lefebvre's categories of
representational space, representations of space and spatial prac-
tices can be operationally mapped onto the predominant modes of
landscape studies in order to consider landscapes as simulta-
neously physical, representational and experiential.9 The second
cluster, in often pertaining to urban landscapes that force aesthetic
reformulations through corporeal engagement as facilitated by the
notion of the cyborg, also helps to overcome the visual bias of much
landscape research and allows more balanced and nuanced in-
terpretations of the ‘material interface between the body and the
city.’10 More generally, this approach reveals the productive roles of
metropolitan cultures and the social and political composition of
the city in ways that are ‘sensitive to the social and historical
contexts that produce the built environment and imbue places with
cultural meaning.’11
Several types of transport infrastructure have been approached
as landscape, including surface-level and elevated roads, railways
and walkways, in ways that e if at times only implicitly e have
considered questions of identity formation.12 In Germany, for
example, the Autobahn [motorway] has been considered within a
landscape framework in order to ascertain its impact on collective
identities.13 But the focus of these studies is usually the national
level, reflecting broader patterns outlined below. A corpus of
literature loosely in this vein also exists for various subterranean
urban infrastructural spaces (including sewers and communication
networks), and of relevance here is Moss' account of the impact of
Berlin's Cold War division and subsequent reunification on the
city's water and energy infrastructures.14 However, few have
addressed how these geopolitical processes affected the city's
municipal railways, and, more generally, urban underground rail-
ways e the buried infrastructure that is, arguably, directly experi-
enced by the greatest number of people on a regular basis e
remains curiously understudied from a landscape perspective.
Addressing these gaps helps satisfy recent calls for innovative ac-
counts of subterranean cultural and historical geographies.15
At the same time, reconceiving landscape ‘to encompass the
interconnectedness of space’ and ‘infrastructure to encompass the
experience of space’ highlights that urban underground railways
are rarely hermetically closed subterranean systems.16 Instead, they
emerge onto and above the surface to connect with other transport
networks, either physically or through the pathways and experi-
ences of those who use them. In other words, they are multi-Beneath London and Berlin, PhD Thesis, University of London, 2014.
10 M. Gandy, Cyborg urbanization: complexity and monstrosity in the contem-
porary city, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29 (2005) 28; see
also A. Picon, Anxious landscapes: from the ruin to rust, Grey Room 1 (2000) 65e83.
11 Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 17.
12 Robertson, Visions of urban mobility; A. Harris, Vertical urbanism: flyovers and
skywalks in Mumbai, in: M. Gandy (Ed), Urban Constellations, Berlin, 2011, 118e123;
P. Merriman, Driving Spaces: A Cultural-Historical Geography of England's M1
Motorway, Oxford, 2007; B. Rosa, Beneath the Arches: Re-appropriating the Spaces of
Infrastructure in Manchester, PhD Thesis, University of Manchester, 2013.
13 See D. Zeller, Driving Germany: The Landscape Of The German Autobahn,
1930e1970, New York and Oxford, 2007.
14 M. Gandy, The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space, Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers 24 (1999) 23e44; Graham and Marvin,
Splintering Urbanism; T. Moss, Divided city, divided infrastructures: securing energy
and water services in postwar Berlin, The Journal of Urban History 35 (2009)
923e942.
15 P. Merriman, Mobilities I: departures, Progress in Human Geography 39 (2014)
87e95.
16 M. Gandy, Landscape and infrastructure in the late-modern metropolis, in: G.
Bridge and S. Watson (Eds), The New Blackwell Companion to the City, Oxford, 2011,
57.
78 S. Merrill / Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 76e91levelled, forming one part of wider municipal infrastructural
landscapes that are simultaneously vertical and horizontal. In this
way they represent contexts in which to consider the research
agendas of both volumetric geography and vertical urbanism that
stress the need to cut through rather than look across landscapes.17
These agendas criticise the horizontal favouritism of much critical
urban research and emphasise a volumetric approach that appre-
ciates ‘the ways in which horizontal and vertical extensions,
imaginaries, materialities and lived practices intersect and mutu-
ally construct each other within and between subterranean, surfi-
cial and suprasurface domains’, while also noting that a concern for
the aerial perspective has obscured crucial subterranean realms.18
Extending across these domains, from deep-level to elevated
tracks and stations, municipal railway networks provide a key
landscape in which to consider these intersections and mutual
constructions. They also exemplify the ‘ordinary’ vertical urbanisms
that Harris contends are key to achieving a ‘more diverse andmulti-
dimensional agenda for understanding and researching urban
verticality.’19 Furthermore, considering municipal railways as con-
structions and constructors of identity in turn extends recent ef-
forts to understand how infrastructure shapes the social world, and
partly answers Adey's appeal to examine how subterranean vol-
umes ‘are lived-in or not, what they feel like and how theymight be
reclaimed or made anew, and how ultimately other social and
cultural registers might tell other sorts of stories.’20
This is not to suggest that municipal railways have not been
interrogated as broader sites of collective and individual identity. A
number of scholars have shown how urban, and often subterra-
nean, railway networks across the world have contributed to the
construction of municipal and, in turn, national identities as sym-
bols of modernity that announced cities' e most often capitals e
and their respective countries' arrival on the world stage.21 Others
have illustrated how municipal railways, along with their constit-
uent technological developments, created new individual sub-
jectivities, performances and modes of governmental conduct as
embodied by the characters of the commuter and passenger.22
While attempts to combine macro- and micro-analyses in these
contexts are growing, they remain rarely pursued alongside one
another and occasionally obscure, or encourage the simplification
of, analyses of the connective intermediary levels of city identities17 E. Weizmann, The politics of verticality, Open Democracy (2002), https://www.
opendemocracy.net/ecology-politicsverticality/article_801.jsp; S. Graham, Vertical
geopolitics: Baghdad and after, Antipode 36 (2004) 12e23.
18 S. Elden, Secure the volume: vertical geopolitics and the depth of power, Po-
litical Geography 34 (2013) 35e51; S. Graham and L. Hewitt, Getting off the ground:
on the politics of urban verticality, Progress in Human Geography 37 (2013) 74e75.
19 A. Harris, Vertical urbanisms: opening up geographies of the three-dimensional
city, Progress in Human Geography (2014) [published online before print], 1.
20 See H. Angelo and C. Hentschel, Interactions with infrastructure as windows
into social worlds: a method for critical urban studies: introduction, City: analysis of
urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action 19 (2015) 306e312; P. Adey, Securing the
volume/volumen: comments on Stuart Elden's plenary paper ‘secure the volume’,
Political Geography 34 (2013) 54.
21 See P. Gibas, Uncanny underground: absences, ghosts and the rhythmed
everyday of the Prague metro, Cultural Geographies 20 (2013) 485e500; A. Jenks, A
Metro on the mount: the underground as a church of Soviet civilization, Technology
and Culture 41 (2000) 697e724; D.L. Pike, Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath
Paris and London, 1800e1945, Ithaca and London, 2005; D.Z. Singh, The History of the
Buenos Aires Underground: A Cultural Analysis of the Modernization Process in a Pe-
ripheral Metropolis (1886e1944), PhD Thesis, University of London, 2012.
22 See R. Hornsey, Listening to the tube map: rhythm and the historiography of
urban map use, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (2012) 675e693;
S. Ho€hne, The birth of the urban passenger: infrastructural subjectivity and the
opening of the New York City subway, City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory,
policy, action 19 (2015) 313e321; J.B. Prestel, Hierarchies of happiness: railway
infrastructure and suburban subject formation in Berlin and Cairo around 1900,
City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action 19 (2015) 322e331.while sometimes assuming the existence of fixed identities,
whether collective or individual. They are also inclined to empha-
sise the significance of a railway's construction or inauguration as
moments of identity formation over longer durations of use and
later processes. The (re)branding of transport authorities and net-
works, for example, is less regularly considered and such processes,
along with the role of municipal railways as constructions and
constructors of identity in general, have rarely been academically
scrutinised in Berlin.23
Berlin itself has been extensively studied as a realm of collective
identity, reflecting the ‘near obsession with defining a German na-
tional identity’ that has dominated much of the country's politics
and public debate since 1945.24 This obsession, the result of not only
the incompatibility of national pride with the historical conse-
quences of the Holocaust, but also the division of Germany into two
separate self-identifying, yet mutually antagonistic, nation states
during the Cold War, was reinvigorated by German unification in
1990, when new problems related to identity construction became
apparent. Since then a number of scholars have interrogated how
Berlin's urban landscapes have been implicated in the construction
of Germany's post-unification national identity. Barnstone has
framed the use of transparency in post-1989 German state archi-
tecture in terms of the construction of national identity and as a
metaphor for a New Germany.25 Till and Colomb, meanwhile, have
separately considered howmemorial and city marketing projects in
Berlin have contributed to the construction of national identity, and
the re-designation of the city as the New Berlin in the period up to
2000when it once again becameGermany's capital.26 Bothnote that
the idea of a New Berlin is itself not new. It has precedents inMartin
Wagner's 1920s modernist housing experiments, Albert Speer's
planned Germania and post-war reconstructive strategies in both
West and East Berlin. The deeper genealogies of various elements of
the New Berlin cautions scholars not to fetishise the post-1989
period and encourages historical contextualisation that reaches
back, at the very minimum, through the post-war period to 1945.27
AlthoughBarnstone, Till andColombavoid thepitfall, analysesof the
construction of German national identities in general seem to have
overshadowed those of Berlin's municipal and individual identities,
especially for the period sinceWorldWar Two (WWII). In part this is
probably because of the difficulties encountered when trying to
isolate different scales of identity; difficulties that are amplified by
the fact that capital cities are often planned and built to reflect the
nation inmicrocosm, but also, at the other end of the scale, by issues
relating to the multiple subjectivities of any single individual. Ulti-
mately however, this imbalance in attention is odd, especially given
that Berlin lends itself to the study of the non-essentialist, mutable
and fluid forms of identities that are thrown into sharp relief by the
numerous geopolitical shifts that it has experienced in the twentieth23 Although see S. Merrill, The London Underground diagram: between palimp-
sest and canon, The London Journal 38 (2013) 245e264; S. Merrill, Looking forward
to the past: London Underground's 150th anniversary, The Journal of Transport
History 33 (2012) 243e252; Prestel, Hierarchies of happiness; H. Manicke, Berlin in
Transit(ion): A Study of the Significance of the U- and S-Bahn Systems in Berlin's
Cultural Texts, Masters Thesis, Queen's University, Ontario, 2010.
24 M. Fulbrook, German National Identity After The Holocaust, Cambridge, 1999, 1.
25 D.A. Barnstone, The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Ger-
many, London, 2005.
26 K.E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place, Minneapolis, 2005; C. Colomb,
Staging The New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics Of Urban Reinvention Post-
1989, Abingdon and New York, 2012; also see A. To€lle, Urban identity policies in
Berlin: from critical reconstruction to reconstructing the Wall, Cities 27 (2010)
348e357.
27 S. Merrill and S. Jasper, Was ist so Berlin? Eine kritische rezension aktueller
linien und fragestellungen der stadtforschung in der deutschen hauptstadt, Sub-
\urban Zeitschrift für Kritische Stadtforschung 2 (2014) 143e154.
S. Merrill / Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 76e91 79century. These ‘identities in transit’ can be discerned in Berlin's
municipal railways after German unification but have their roots in
the post-1945 period that saw ColdWar tensions divide the city and
its infrastructure.
Divided infrastructures
The heavy allied bombing raids of February 1945, which targeted
Berlin's railways in order to disrupt troop movements, and the
fierce ground fighting of late April and early May 1945 that saw
the S- and U-Bahn become strategic networks in an urban
battleground, meant that by the end of WWII much of the city's
railway infrastructure lay inoperable, in a ruinous state.28 Vast
sections of the S- and U-Bahn's elevated, surface and subterranean
tracks e the interconnected volumetric landscapes whose con-
struction dated to 1871 and 1902 respectively e lay destroyed or
flooded, and in places uncannily exposed.29 Although their
reconstruction commenced a week after Germany's capitulation,
the railways only became operable to their pre-war extent in late
1950. These reconstructive efforts were at first hindered and then
reversed by the geopolitical divisions that the city soon came to
symbolise. These divisions gained their greatest expression with
the erection of the Berlin Wall (hereafter referred to as the Wall) in
1961, but the 155 km long construction that encased West Berlin
was only the concretization of a separation process that had
started in the earliest post-war years.30 This process affected
Berlin's municipal railways as much as it did any other sphere of
life in the city.
Administrative divisions
The seeds of the S-Bahn's division were sown in the allied de-
cision to allow the railway's operating rights to remain with the
Deutsche Reichsbahn [German Railways] (DR), which was initially
controlled by the Sowjetische Milita€radministration in Deutschland
[Soviet Military Administration in Germany] (SMAD) and later
became the state railway of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik
[German Democratic Republic] (DDR). The U-Bahn network,
meanwhile, remained the responsibility of the Berliner Ver-
kehrsbetriebe [Berlin Transport Service] (BVG), which was
answerable to the post-war Berlin magistrate. The BVG became
increasingly implicated in divisive political squabbles following
the Western monetary reforms of June 1948, and during the
Soviet Union's blockade of West Berlin, in ways that contributed
to the establishment of two separate Berlin magistrates in late
1948, each with a separately elected mayor e the Communist,
Friedrich Ebert Jr., in the East and the Social Democrat, Ernst
Reuter, in the West.31
Reuter, elected mayor of the magistrate in 1947, had previ-
ously been forced to resume his position as municipal councillor
for transport and utilities when the SMAD vetoed his election. In
this position he created a new department of transport in West28 T. Le Tissier, Race for the Reichstag: The 1945 Battle for Berlin, Oregon, 1999; F.
Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945, London, 2005.
29 R. Berger, Die wiederingangsetzung der U-Bahn im jahre 1945, Straßen-und
Tiefbau 11 (1948) 308e314; for the transport histories of the S- and U-Bahn, see P.
Bley, Berliner S-Bahn, Düsseldorf, 2003; U. Lemke and U. Poppel, Berliner U-Bahn,
Düsseldorf, 1996.
30 M. Wilke, The Path to the Berlin Wall: Critical Stages in the History of Divided
Germany, Berlin, 2014.
31 The Berliner Verkehrs-Aktien Gessellschaft was formed in December 1928 and
became the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe in January 1938 but retained the BVG
acronym. The blockade was triggered by the monetary reforms and lasted from 1
April 1948 until 12 May 1949. The West Berlin magistrate became the West Berlin
senate in 1950.Berlin in October 1948 amidst growing tension caused by,
amongst other factors, trade union reforms that saw the
Western-influenced Independent Trade Union Organisation split
from the Eastern-influenced Free German Trade Union Federa-
tion. Thereafter, in November 1948, Reuter was unilaterally and,
from the perspective of the Western Allies, illegally relieved by
the SMAD of his duties to the magistrate.32 Reuter's Soviet-
backed replacement, Heinz Schlicke, quickly requested that BVG
relocate its headquarters from West Berlin, where it had been
since the late 1930s, to East Berlin, in an attempt, presumably, to
bring it within the Soviet Union's spatial sphere of influence. This
request was refused, but in March 1949, staff disputes, height-
ened by competing trade unions, led Reuter, now mayor of West
Berlin, to dismiss BVG's personnel director, Wilhelm Knapp. The
East Berlin magistrate backed Knapp and began referring, for the
first time, to an Eastern BVG directorate. The following month
Reuter agreed that certain BVG administrative departments be
split between East and West.33 Thus, for a short time, after the
creation of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland [Federal Republic of
Germany](BRD) in May 1949, a single transport network e still
notionally unified e served and bound two different national
states, ideological systems, economic administrations and the
diverging identities that these were giving rise to. Then, on 1st
August 1949, BVG was fully divided and Knapp placed in charge
of a newly formed BVG-East. Thus, by the time the DDR was
created in October 1949, two separate transport authorities, BVG-
West and BVG-East, served their respective halves of Berlin,
reflecting the increasing impact of geopolitical divisions on the
city's governmental departments and infrastructure which had
already led to the partition of the police and fire departments in
July 1948 and the SMAD's manipulation of electricity, gas, water
and sewage services during the blockade, and would lead to the
disconnection of cross-sector telecommunications in May 1952.34
In all, BVG's division followed a spatial logic in which re-
sponsibility for maintaining infrastructure and operating services
was allocated according to the dominant East-West binary. The
result of this geography of division for the fixed infrastructure of
the U-Bahn network meant that the track and stations of the A
Lines (today's U2 Line) that crossed the sector border, initially un-
interrupted, were split between BVG-West and BVG-East, while
their service relied on inter-sector train crews. Meanwhile, BVG-
West retained full responsibility for the B Line (today's U1 Line)
as only one of its stations lay in East Berlin. The management of the
intermediate eastern sections and stations of the C and D Lines
(today's U6 and U8 Lines), which ran from north to south West
Berlin beneath East Berlin, were handed to BVG-East while BVG-
West retained responsibility for the lines' western stations, train
crews and power supply. Finally, BVG-East gained full responsibility
for the E Line (today's U5 Line), which ran entirely in East Berlin.35
Hidden divisions
BVG's inter-sector bus and tram services ceased in early 1949 and
late 1952 respectively, but U-Bahn services continued to run freely
across the city and provide a ‘last bridge’ for passengers until the32 See G. Schoeler, SMA spaltet Berliner: Verwaltung Reuter und Klingelho€fer
“abgesetzt”, Die Neue Zeitung, 18 November 1948.
33 H. Reif, “Mobilit€at für alle” 75 Jahre BVG, 1929e2004, in BVG (Ed), 75 Jahre BVG:
Tradition auf neuen Gleisen, Berlin, 2004, 1e16.
34 Wilke, The Path to the Berlin Wall; Moss, Divided city, divided infrastructures;
G.W.S. Robinson, West Berlin: the geography of an exclave, Geographical Review 43
(1953) 540e557.
35 Rolling stock and depots were split in a similar manner.
80 S. Merrill / Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 76e91construction of the Wall.36 So, in the U-Bahn at least, BVG's
administrative division remained ‘hidden’ to some until the early
1950s. It did so in part because a consistent fare system initially
remained in place across the network. The 1948 monetary reforms
created problems because BVG initially accepted both currencies,
and passengers quickly learnt to take advantage of the favourable
conversion rate of the Eastern Deutschmark (EDM) against the
Western Deutschmark (WDM). In March 1949 it was agreed that
journeys with a standard cost should be paid in the currency of
their place of origin and this fare structure remained in place until
May 1951 when BVG-West first increased the fares for its networks.
From then on BVG-West's fare structure was developed to include a
wider range of higher priced ticket options, while BVG-East's
continued to rely on a standard fixed 20Pf fare within a relatively
inflexible structure until 1990.37
BVG's administrative partition was also masked by BVG-West
and BVG-East's initial collaboration in order to ensure the
continued operation of their less flexible forms of infrastruc-
ture.38 For example, they cooperated on the post-war recon-
struction of Hausvogteiplatz U-Bahn station in East Berlin. The
station's reopening in January 1950 e the type of occasion that,
as discussed above, had the potential to help create collective
identities e was presided over by Knapp but was also attended
by two BVG-West representatives, and was reported by the East
Berlin press as a symbol not only of BVG-East's reconstruction
programme but also of what could be achieved when Berliners
worked together.39 This remnant of a unified identity had been
further eroded, and identities were clearly in transition, by the
time BVG-East reopened the newly renamed Tha€lmannplatz U-
Bahn station just eight months later, in August 1950. In this case
BVG-West was not involved in the station's reconstruction, nor
represented at the reopening, and East Berlin press coverage now
emphasised ideological divides by stressing that the station's
destruction had been caused by Anglo-American bombs.40 The
decision to ceremonially rename the station and the square it
served after Ernst Tha€lmann, the former leader of the German
Communist Party who was murdered in the Buchenwald con-
centration camp in 1944, was part of a wave of commemorative
renamings that took place in East Berlin between late 1949 and
the summer of 1951. The role of toponyms in the construction of
political identities is well documented and the precedent of us-
ing the renaming (as opposed to the naming) of Berlin's train
stations to engender collective memories and identities had
already been set during the National Socialist period with, most
famously, U-Bahn stations renamed after Adolf Hitler and Horst
Wessel.41 In the 1950s a similar strategy helped naturalise an
East Berlin political identity but also revealed the extent of the
city's division. The inclusion of a pantheon of DDR heroes and
martyrs (including Tha€lmann, Stalin, Dimitroff, Marchlewski,
Luxemburg and Ulbricht) within the U- and S-Bahn's toponymic
landscape led to grievances and idiosyncrasies that actually
helped reveal the extent of the transport authority's division,
thereby allowing East Berliners and East Germans to identify
more easily with BVG-East. For example, as one commentator
wrote to the eastern Berliner Zeitung,36 Robinson, West Berlin; Reif, “Mobilita€t für alle”, 10.
37 B. Hardy, The Berlin U-Bahn, Harrow Weald, 1996.
38 Robinson, West Berlin.
39 E.R., Berlins scho€nster U-Bahnhof fertiggestellt, Neues Deutschland, 8 January
1950, 6.
40 T.H., Scho€nster Bahnhof: “Th€almannplatz”, Berliner Zeitung, 19 August 1950, 6.
41 See M. Azaryahu, German reunification and the politics of street names: the
case of East Berlin, Political Geography 16 (1997) 479e493; Merrill, Excavating Buried
Memories.When I recently used the U-Bahn towards Pankow and the
conductor announced ‘Dimitroffstrasse’… there was, regrettably
no lack of irrelevant, stupid and… disrespectful remarks.42
Thus, from as early as 1950 Berlin's transport infrastructure
became a landscape within which Berliners' diverging identities
were expressed. Besides being ridiculed, the new East Berlin
station names were also ignored. While they appeared on the
network maps that BVG-East produced from 1951, they did not
appear on BVG-West's maps until 1952 e and only then in a
smaller subscript beneath what the West Berlin senate believed
to be the stations' legitimate former names (see Fig. 1).43 An East
German schoolchild complained to the Berliner Zeitung in 1951
when he noticed a map that did not show Tha€lmannplatz U-Bahn
station.44 A journalist from the newspaper investigated further
and later clarified:
The BVG in the democratic sector [BVG-East] informs us of
something that many Berliners do not know…the Berlin U-
Bahn, with the exception of Line E, is operated by the West
Berlin BVG. Although BVG-West has the new map it refuses
to install it. It relies on the decisions of the West Berlin
government, which does not recognise the renaming of
streets and squares in the democratic sector of Berlin [East
Berlin]… [I]f today it is still possible to find old maps in the
U-Bahn, the BVG in the democratic sector is blameless.45
In late May 1952, on the day West Germany's sovereignty
was confirmed, the DDR closed its national borders, thus
requiring all West Berliners to acquire travel permits before
visiting East Berlin and resulting in the closure by September
1952 of 200 of the 277 streets that led from West Berlin to East
Berlin and East German Brandenburg.46 BVG-West seems to
have predicted the border closure as in January 1952 it released
a new map on the occasion of the U-Bahn's fiftieth anniversary,
which displayed, for the first time, the sector border in a
manner that would be echoed by later cartographic iterations
throughout the 1950s (Fig. 1). In 1961 the hatched black line
that at first represented a political boundary and the DDR's
fluctuating border regulations came to represent the solid
topographical feature of the Wall.Physical divisions and networked ruins
The border-sealing process ordered by the DDR government on
Sunday 13th August 1961 involved the permanent closure of 68 of
81 border crossing points and 193 streets.47 Twelve municipal
railway lines were directly affected and sixteen separate stations
became what Moss has called truncated, consolidated and
bypassed spaces e infrastructural intersections that created ten-
sions between the two political regimes and which, at least from
the Eastern perspective, required active policing.48 However, these
railway lines did not become completely obsolete. The stations on
the BVG-West lines under East Berlin (today's U6 and U8 Lines) and42 C. Kaiser, Clara-Zetkin-Straße fehlt, Berliner Zeitung, 11 March 1950, 2. All
translations in this article are by the author.
43 BVG-West displayed the former names of renamed West Berlin stations in the
same way.
44 W. Irmgard, Warum noch “Kaiserhof”, Berliner Zeitung, 22 August 1951, 4.
45 H.A.E., Darum noch “Kaiserhof”, Berliner Zeitung, 26 August 1951, 8.
46 F. Taylor, The Berlin Wall, London, 2009; Wilke, The Path to the Berlin Wall.
47 Taylor, The Berlin Wall, 162.
48 Moss, Divided city, divided infrastructures.
S. Merrill / Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 76e91 81
Fig. 1. The January 1952 BVG-West U-Bahn map showing the sector border for the first time. Source: BVG Archiv. Reproduced with the permission of BVG.those of the S-Bahn lying close to the border or beneathWest Berlin
(today's S1 and S2 Lines) were secured by the installation of watch-
posts and the removal of obstructions to sightlines, but otherwise
their architectural fabric was left to slowly erode, and they soon
became known as Geisterbahnho€fe [ghost-stations].49 Until
November 1989 these stations were populated only by the DDR
border guards and transport police, who were observed as spectral
figures (hence ghost-stations) by passengers in the BVG-West
trains that were required to travel through the stations at
maximum speed.50 Thus the Wall's defences were extended to the
subterranean border, where it dissected operational and aban-
doned tunnels and track. East German citizens used these inter-
sector railway lines in a number of escape attempts, but, above-
ground, access to their subterranean stations was blocked and their
signs removed making it almost impossible for the public to reach
the tunnels.51 The closure and camouflaging of the stations was
pursued to such an extent that reference to them on East German
maps was eliminated, thereby facilitating forms of collective
amnesia amongst the East Berlin population, particularly thosewho
moved to the city after 1961.49 This term is now used in cities across the world, but in Berlin e where it seems
to have originated e it triggers particular Cold War connotations that resonate with
interpretations of the city as inhabited by the spectral traces of Germany's negative
twentieth-century pasts. See B. Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German
History in the Urban Landscape, Chicago, 1997; Till, The New Berlin.
50 Hardy, The Berlin U-Bahn.
51 See G. Sa€lter and T. Schaller, Fluchtversuche durch die S- und U-Bahn-tunnel, in:
G. Sa€lter and T. Schaller (Eds), Grenz-und Geisterbahnho€fe im geteilten Berlin, Berlin,
2013, 100e112.
52 Merrill, Excavating Buried Memories; cf. M. Qvistro€m, Network ruins and green
structure development: an attempt to trace relational spaces of a railway ruin,
Landscape Research 37 (2012) 257e275; S. Jasper, Phantom limbs: encountering the
hidden spaces of West Berlin, in: Gandy (Ed), Urban Constellations, 153e157.These networked ruins e dormant places lying within webs of
still functioning transport routes e were not restricted to East
Berlin.52 The interruption of the A Lines led to the closure of two
western U-Bahn stations in the early 1970s, but the physical impact
of division onWest Berlin's railway infrastructurewasmostmarked
on the S-Bahn. The city's iconic Ringbahn was split in two and a
number of radial interregional S-Bahn lines projecting from West
Berlin into the East German Brandenburg were also cut, creating an
isolated western S-Bahn network run by the East for the West. A
West Berlin boycott of the S-Bahn was quickly established as a
political gesture and ameans towithhold foreign currency from the
DDR.53 The boycott, buoyed by popular slogans like ‘Every West
Berliner S-Bahn passenger pays for the barbed wire’ persisted for
twenty-five years, with the result that the DDR reduced its in-
vestment in the network (Fig. 2). The boycott provides yet another
example of how the diverging identities of West and East Berliners
were constructed around physical transport infrastructure and the
policies of those responsible for it. A later strike by West Berlin S-
Bahn employees in 1980 led to numerous redundancies and the
decision to decommission nearly half of the S-Bahn network in
West Berlin.54 The decommissioned tracks and stations quickly fell
into disrepair, as illustrated by photographs of the time, and the S-
Bahn, ‘once a synonym for exemplary transport, became a negative
term.’55
The city's reunification from 1989 created new networked ruins.
Given the Cold War politics of infrastructure, the West Berlin53 Calls to boycott the S-Bahn in West Berlin began in the 1950s but it was not
until the construction of the Wall that they gained widespread popular support.
54 W. Zach and K. Evers, Der Berliner schnellbahnnetze e ihre entwicklung und
ihre funktionen, Berlinerstatistik Monatsschrift 3 (2003) 266e294.
55 Zach and Evers, Der Berliner schnellbahnnetze, 280; See A. Behrens and V.
Noth, Berliner Stadtbahn Bilder, Berlin, 1981.
82 S. Merrill / Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 76e91
Fig. 2. The boycott of the S-Bahn at the Berlin Zoologischer Garten S-Bahn station in West Berlin in September 1961. Source: Foto Archiv Alex Waidmann. Photograph by Alex
Waidmann.senate's transport plans relied on U-Bahn and road construction.
From the mid-1950s it embarked on an ambitious plan to extend
the former to 200 km of track, relying partly on the resurrection of
the F Line, which dated to the 1920s. Sections of the F Line, or the
U10 as it was later known, had been pre-emptively constructed in
the 1930s, and in the 1970s further sections were built in connec-
tion with motorway construction and the expansion of other U-
Bahn lines.56 Much of the U10 was planned to run parallel to the
one of the few sections of the S-Bahn still functioning in West
Berlin. As a result, when the West Berlin senate and East German
magistrate negotiated the hand-over of the West Berlin S-Bahn to
BVG-West in 1984, the plans to construct the U10 were shelved and
the rehabilitation of the West Berlin S-Bahn was prioritised.57
German unification sealed the U10's fate, leaving its incomplete
vestiges to represent the cycles of transport investment that had
been determined by the city's geopolitical division.58 The conse-
quences of unification for the rest of the city's municipal railway
networks, including East Berlin's ghost-stations and the S-Bahn
system inWest Berlin, were arguably more positive. These stations'
reconnection and BVG's rebranding acted as symbols of and win-
dows into the political and social changes that the city experienced
in the years after 1989, and the ways in which these changes were
reflected in the municipal and individual identities of that time.(Re)connections
The reconnection or (re)membering of the city's U- and S-Bahn
networks reflected the euphoria and shocks associated with the
immediate and then protracted processes of unification. The trun-
cated, bypassed and consolidated spaces of the Cold War U-Bahn
were only completely reversed and its networked ruins fully56 J. Gallico, Geschichte der U10, in: J. Gallico and C. Rekade (Eds), U10 von hier aus
ins Imagina€re und wieder zurück, Berlin, 2011, 192e198. In 1966 BVG-West allocated
numbers to all its U-Bahn lines.
57 Gallico, Geschichte Der U10.
58 Jasper, Phantom limbs.reintegrated into a working system when the final gap in the
network, which isolated Warschauer Strasse U-Bahn station from
the U1, was closed in October 1995. Prior to this the incompatible
electric polarities used by what were by then known as BVB in the
east and BVG in the west had delayed the U2's return to full service
until November 1993.59 The S-Bahn's reconnection was even more
drawn out, as illustrated by the gradual return of the Ringbahn over
the course of more than a decade. The reintegration of the two
systems' subterranean ghost-stations, and particularly those of the
U-Bahn, was more rapid, with the result that the two networks can
be read as individually having indexed the divergent durations of
the city's reunification. The U-Bahn's fortunes mirrored the more
immediate, ‘heady’ experiences and rapid decisions of unification,
while those of the S-Bahn better symbolised the prolonged realities
of a city that nearly ten years after the fall of the Wall was still
popularly conceived as ‘unified but not united.’60Explorations and encounters
TheWall's fall triggered an intense period of exploration as East and
West Berliners rushed to rediscover the parts of the city that had
previously been prohibited to them including the networked ruins
of Berlin's municipal railways.61 In the period between November
1989 and the ghost-stations’ return to service (as outlined below)
their derelict state and previously restricted status attracted the
attention of numerous individuals, including transport enthusiasts
and photographers. The moments in which Berliners reacquainted
themselves with the hidden subterranean connections between
their respective halves of the city are evocatively captured in the59 Hardy, The Berlin U-Bahn. BVG-East became the state owned Kombinat Berliner
Verkehrsbetriebe [Combined Berlin Transport Service] (BVB) in 1969 allowing BVG-
West to revert to BVG.
60 P. James, The new Germany eight years on, in: P. James (Ed), Modern Germany:
Politics, Society and Culture, London, 1998, 5.
61 T. Book, The urban field of Berlin: expansion e isolation e reconstruction,
Geografiska Annaler Series B, Human Geography 77 (1995) 177e196.
S. Merrill / Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 76e91 83
Fig. 3. The S-Bahn Potsdamerplatz ghost-station shortly before its restoration began in March 1990. Source Landesarchiv Berlin. Photograph by Henk John Hipfel.periodicals of both eastern and western transport enthusiast soci-
eties, which during the early 1990s recurrently featured photo-
graphic exposes of ghost-stations and sometimes even entire
tunnel courses.62As the Berlin State Archive's records testify,
numerous photographers took advantage of the aesthetic proper-
ties of ghost-stations during the small window of opportunity
afforded by German unification and the uncertainty it caused about
who was responsible for the securitisation of these places (Fig. 3).
Theatre producers also took advantage of the particularities that
offered easier access to places previously e and today once more,
albeit for different reasons e out of bounds. In June and July 1990,
for example, the disused Potsdamer Platz S-Bahn station hosted a
theatre production called Straße aus Papier [Streets of Paper],
written by the young East German playwright, Michael Peschke.63
In these years youths also began to explore the city's working
railway network in new ways. Train-surfing, the highly dangerous
act of climbing onto the outside of moving trains for enjoyment,
was first reported in Hamburg in 1988 but soon became prevalent
in Berlin, where the S-Bahn's out-dated rolling stock and low
staffing created a train-surfing ‘paradise’.64 In Berlin, S-Bahn Surfen,62 See D. Bohrer, Impressionen vom S-Bf. Potsdamer Platz, Berliner Verkehrsbla€tter,
August 1990, 177; M. Reimer, Untergrundentdeckungen, Verkehrsgeschichtliche
Bla€tter, January 1991, 18.
63 Anonymous, Schüsse im schacht, Der Spiegel 26 (1990) 169.
64 Anonymous, Ko€nig der linie, Der Spiegel 15 (1988) 114e115; H. Strauch, I. Wirth,
and G. Geserick, Fatal accidents due to train surfing in Berlin, Forensic Science In-
ternational 94 (1998) 119e127.as it was known, was arguably a further consequence of the
ambiguous moments and protracted process of unification:
whereby the landscape of the city's railway infrastructure offered
new opportunities for its youths to adopt rebellious subjectivities
and identities while pushing at, and overcoming, previously
accepted boundaries during a period when they were increasingly
exposed to the payoffs of anti-authoritarianism. But as the music
video to The Puhdys' 1992 song Wie Ein Engel [Like an Angel]
demonstrates, these transgressions could be as debilitating as they
were intoxicating. The video ends with the death of a Berlin train-
surfer reflecting the fact that between 1989 and 1995 train-surfing
caused forty-one accidents, including eighteen fatalities, in the city,
the vast majority on the S-Bahn.65
The more mundane but most common form of ‘exploration’
people undertook after 1989 was simply using the rail networks in
order to (re)discover the other half of the city. These everyday ex-
plorations led to encounters between East and West German citi-
zens and identities. As Barnstone notes, after 1989 ‘East and West
Germans found themselves looking at each other without any of
the protective devices that had hitherto been in place’, a condition
that she described as ‘facing the other and looking him or her in the
face.’66 Some of the earliest opportunities for Berliners to look each
other in the face were afforded by the city's railway infrastructure
and were acutely evident within the carriages of the U-Bahn due to65 Strauch et al., Fatal accidents due to train surfing in Berlin.
66 Barnstone, The Transparent State, 89.
84 S. Merrill / Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 76e91
Fig. 4. Passengers facing each other and waiting to depart the recently reopened Bernauer Strasse U-Bahn ghost-station in April 1990. Source: Bundesarchiv. Photograph by Thomas
Uhlemann.their seating arrangements and the lack of distracting passing
scenery along their mostly subterranean routes (Fig. 4). The in-
teractions between East and West Berliners, and the early meeting
of their associated identities, were further intensified in the
enclosed landscape of the U-Bahn because BVG granted East
German citizens free use of its network until 1990. The resultant
overcrowding was particularly marked during the opening of the
former ghost-stations.
The Jannowitzbrücke U-Bahn station was the first ghost-station
to reopen, on a Saturday, just two days after the Wall fell. Customs
officers and railway clerks soon gave up taking payment and
inspecting identification papers from the three thousand people
who had waited over four hours to board the first U-Bahn trains to
West Berlin.67 That weekend 800,000 East Germans visited West
Berlin, BVG-West carried around 2.6 million more passengers than
usual and some U-Bahn stations had to be closed due to over-
crowding.68 The U-Bahn, then, perhaps more than any other part of
Berlin's public transport infrastructure, reflected the initial
euphoric experiences and hopes that accompanied German
unification.
Shock therapy
Further ghost U-Bahn stations were reopened in December 1989
and April 1990, and the ghost S-Bahn stations on today's S1 and S2
lines were all returned to service by 1991, with the exception of
Potsdamer Platz station, which remained closed until March
1992.69 However, the greatest number of station reopenings in a
single day took place on 1st July 1990, when the final seven ghost-
stations on the U8 and U6 returned to service.70 The choice of date67 Reuters, ‘Ghost station’ opens, The Observer, 12 November 1989, 10.
68 P. Hauschild, Neue grenzüberga€nge nach Westberlin, Verkehrsgeschichtliche
Bla€tter, January 1990, 22.
69 F. Neubacher, Wiederinbetriebnahme des Nord-Süd-S-Bahn-tunnels, Berliner
Verkehrsbla€tter, April 1992, 76e78.
70 The two East Berlin U-Bahn lines were also allocated numbers on this day.was not accidental. It was the same day that the German Economic,
Monetary and Social Union, the first of the four accords that offi-
cially brought about unification, came into effect. As such it illus-
trated how acts of infrastructural reinauguration could, like
inauguration, be used to help construct and institutionalise desired
collective identities in association with wider political processes,
while also helping to mask underlying ruptures. Although various
means of pursuing monetary union were initially debated, by
January 1990 the BRD government had decided on a ‘shock therapy’
approach that quickly established the parity of the two German
currencies. Thus, on the same day as large crowds congregated on
the platform of the former Alexanderplatz U8 ghost-station to
celebrate its reopening, along with film crews, the West Berlin
senator for transport and services and the mayor of East Berlin, the
average income of East Germans became roughly equal to one-third
of that of their western neighbours (Fig. 5).71
The shock of economic unification was reflected in the changes
to Berlin's public transport ticket prices, where confusing fare
structures reinforced divided identities for many years, even as a
more gradual process of equalisation attempted to soften the blow
of factory closures and soaring unemployment in East Germany. To
beginwith East Germans could use BVG services for a standard fare
of 2 EDM, if they bought their tickets in advance, while West Ger-
mans and non-German citizens paid 2.70 WDM. At the same time
the standard cost for using BVB services remained just 20Pf. In
August 1991 fares were standardised across BVG and BVB when
both, together answerable to a unified Berlin senate, introduced a
standard 3 WDM fare with a special 1.8 WDM fare for those who
could prove that they were residents of the former DDR.72 Only in
January 1995 did all Berliners start paying the same standard fare.
The special fare structure for East Berliners reflected in micro-
cosm the transfer payments made by the German Federal71 Colomb, Staging the New Berlin.
72 Proof of residence was required as DDR citizenship was no longer valid and its
associated identity papers and passports were being replaced.
S. Merrill / Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 76e91 85
Fig. 5. The crowded platform of the Alexanderplatz U8 platform on the day of its re-opening. Source: Landesarchiv Berlin. Photograph by Ingeborg Lommatzsch.Government to the former DDR, which in effect replaced pre-
unification DDR state subsidies.73 As such it no doubt fuelled
resentment between so-called ‘Wessis’ and ‘Ossis’, with the former
considering the latter opportunists that placed a strain on the
country's economy and the latter resenting the former's wealth.
Thus, even after the integration of BVG and BVB in 1992, continuing
fare discrepancies stretched divisions between Berlin's identities
beyond the Cold War that had created them. In fact, Berlin's public
transport fare structure may have reinforced, and not only
stretched, opposing identities after unification, as arguably the very
idea of ‘Wessis’ and ‘Ossis’ only became real once these two groups
encountered each other more. This fare structure relied on ‘zones’
that created cartographic echoes of the city's physical division (see
Fig. 8) and continued to govern the performance of identities until
1995 e as passengers using special fares were asked to prove their
(former) East German status e whereas other indicators of East
Berlin identity disappeared from the map far more quickly.Toponymic de-commemoration and cartographic Incorporation
The de-commemoration of the former DDR's toponymic heritage, as
illustrated by the renaming of countless streets during the early
1990s, was echoed and in some instances preceded in Berlin's
transport network, thanks to administrative and bureaucratic con-
ditions that allowed renaming decisions to be made and resolved
rapidly.74 While street renaming decisions were the preserve of
Berlin's individual district assemblies, U-Bahn station names fell
under the jurisdiction of the freshly unified senate elected in
December 1990. In July 1991 politicians started to note that in this
realm of public life ‘the senate did not have to wait for the district
assemblies and could accelerate the elimination of Stalinist names
from the streetscape through their own actions.'75 Subsequently,73 Barnstone, The Transparent State.
74 Azaryahu, German reunification and the politics of street names.
75 Anonymous, Umbenennung von Bahnho€fen gefordert, Neue Zeit, 17 July 1991,
22.plans were made to rapidly rename ten U-Bahn stations so that the
de-commemoration of their associated DDR personalities would
coincide with the commemoration of the first anniversary of
German unification. Arranged by the new senator for transport and
services and Christian Democrat Union (CDU) member, Herwig
Haase, without any official public consultation, the name changes
sidestepped the intense public protest that surrounded the renam-
ingof streets.76 Although thenamechangesweremade in suchhaste
that some station signs were misspelled, an autonomous women's
organisation was able to successfully resist the renaming of Rosa-
Luxembourg-Platz U-Bahn station. Because of wider protests over
the renamingof streets, only one of thenine stations renamed at this
time reverted to its previous name. Instead the CDU-led senate took
advantage of the U-Bahn's institutional context to introduce new
station names that shifted their functional reference to alternative
streets (Fig. 6). Thus toponyms were replaced in a way that also
created an atmosphere more conducive to the renaming of the
streets that the stations had previously referred to. Due to the S-
Bahn's differentmanagement structure its stations reflected similar
impulses slightly later, and Ernst-Tha€lmann-Park S-Bahn station
remained in use until mid-1993.
BVG-West's maps, which, unlike BVB's, never omitted reference
to the railways on the other side of the Wall, also became an
invaluable tool for those encountering the other half of the city for
the first time in late 1989. Enlarged copies were hastily attached to
the walls of the Jannowitzbrücke U-Bahn station when it reopened
to enable DDR citizens to orientate themselves within a network
that must have appeared to have increased in size from around
26 km to 135 km of track overnight (Fig. 7). Soon a newly designed
map published in January 1990 ‘cartographically incorporated’ the
two halves of the city.77 On this map BVG's cartographic design
principles subsumed those of BVB, resonating with the view that76 See J. Meyer-Kronthaler, U-Bahnhofs-umbenennungen, Berliner Verkehrsbla€tter,
October 1991, 212e213.
77 Book, The urban field of Berlin.
86 S. Merrill / Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 76e91
Fig. 6. The changing U-Bahn station signs that highlight the de-commemoration of Otto Grotewohl and the reemphasis of the nearby Mohrenstrabe. Source: Landesarchiv Berlin.
Photograph by Rolf Zo€llner.
Fig. 7. Passengers consult a BVG-West map in Jannowitzbrücke U-Bahn station the day after the Wall's fall. Source: Landesarchiv Berlin. Photograph by Ludwig Ehlers.theWest determined the unification process.78 The cover featured a
photograph of the Brandenburg Gate e a symbol in both East and
West Germany of different versions of the country's unitye and the
Wall, through which both East and West Berliners pass and come78 On this view, see Blacksell, Partition, die Wende, and German unification.into contact with one another.79 Given the gate's location in East
Berlin it had been absent from the list of tourist attractions
advertised on the BVG maps of the 1970s, which instead emphas-
ised West Berlin tourist sites, some with a Cold War significance79 See Ladd, Ghosts of Berlin.
S. Merrill / Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 76e91 87
Fig. 8. Spiekermann and MetaDesign's May 1992 map showing a tariff border that echoed the course of the Wall. Source: Landesarchiv Berlin. Reproduced with the permission of BVG.
88 S. Merrill / Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 76e91
83 L. Krüger, Die Berliner verkehrsbetriebe im wandel der zeit, TypoJournal 3
(2011) 54e62; G. Heinickel, Berlin: after the growth: planning mobility culture in
an environment of dynamic stagnation, in: Institute for Mobility Research (Ed),such as the 1951 memorial to the victims of the ‘air bridge’ that had
supported West Berlin during its blockade. Since 1990 the Bran-
denburg Gate has once again become a defining symbol of the city
and of the process of German unification as a whole. This is evi-
denced by its use in official city marketing campaigns. It is the
centrepiece of the logo for the be Berlin campaign that was
launched in 2008 by Berlin Partner, originally formed as Partner für
Berlin [Partner for Berlin] (PfB) in 1994: a public-private partner-
ship of over 200 companies committed to the global promotion of
Berlin.80 As a member of Berlin Partner, BVG today includes the be
Berlin logo on its trains, buses, trams and ferries, and since 2008 it
has used an anti-vandalism covering featuring the Brandenburg
Gate on the windows of its vehicles to prevent them being defaced
by scratching. In fact, however, BVG instigated its own post-1990
rebranding process, outside the confines of wider city marketing
strategies, in a bid to establish its corporate identity. This
rebranding process, whose consideration helps complicate and
enrich the history of Berlin's centralised branding and marketing,
was one of the earliest avenues for the construction of a unified
Berlin municipal identity.
(Re)brandings
As of 1st January 1992 BVB was dissolved and its services merged
with those of BVG in a process referred to officially as Fusion 92. A
month earlier BVB's staff newspaper, Signal, was released in a
redesigned format and under a one-off subtitle: ‘the newspaper for
the employees of BVG and BVB’.81 The issue's number e zero e
revealed that it related more to the prevalent rhetoric of the so-
called ‘Zero Hour’ and its attempts to reset the clock after the
interruption of division than it did to the notion of a shared future
invoked by the fusion metaphor. A supplement that accompanied
the issue answered employees' questions and made explicit the
new identities that former BVB, more than former BVG, employees
would be expected to adopt. A question from a BVB employee about
staff uniforms wasmet with the clear response that, in the interests
of constructing a ‘uniform image’, former BVB staff would be
required to give up their old attire. Each page of the supplement
featured the slogan ‘Once again for the whole of Berlin:
BVB þ BVG ¼ BVG’. On paper, the ‘fusion’ of the two transport
authorities also reduced BVB's sum value to zero. The only element
of the equation to suggest that the new BVG was any different from
its West Berlin predecessor was that it was now rendered in a new
typeface against a bold yellow square, BVG's new logo, as designed
by Erik Spiekermann and his company, MetaDesign.82
The uniform image of BVG
During the 1990s Spiekermann and MetaDesign were increasingly
called upon to communicate BVG's reunified status and its desire
for visual consistency. Together they would deliver the uniform
image of BVG's new brand that would come to be one of the earliest
indicators of the city's new, post-unification identity. Besides the
logo they also designed a new map and typeface, and developed a
new standardised way-finding system for the network. A core
element of all of these design strategies was the prevalent use of
the colour yellow, which was echoed in the new livery of BVG's80 See Colomb, Staging the New Berlin.
81 Signal, 0, December 1991, Das BVG Archiv, Berlin.
82 Spiekermann claims to have only refined an inherited logo although it could be
argued that his refinements constitute a new design and that the inherited logo
that he enhanced was itself only a short-lived replacement of an older logo. See R.
Kinross, conversation with Erik Spiekermann, Information Design Journal 7 (1993)
29e40.trains, trams and buses. The colour was intentionally chosen in
order to emulate the iconicity of New York's yellow taxis and
London's red double-decker buses.83 But it was also historically
informed and cited the colour initially used by BVG to standardise
the appearance of the tram companies that it took responsibility for
when it was formed in 1928. This had been replaced during the
National Socialist period by an ivory beige colour that remained on
Berlin's buses and trams until 1990.84 Thus the return of an ‘electric’
yellow served to reinforce, perhaps subconsciously, one of the few
commonalities that bound East and West: their shared rejection of
the National Socialist past. The spread of yellow throughout the city
also found echoes in the earliest post-1989 place marketing stra-
tegies pursued by the Berlin senate before the founding of PfB, as
testified to by its use in the city's bid, between 1991 and 1993, to
host the 2000 Olympics.85
Spiekermann and Metadesign's new integrated U- and S-Bahn
map, introduced in May 1992, used a new scale and geometry that
pre-emptede and was therefore able to accommodate e the future
reconnection of the city's municipal railways (Fig. 8). It functioned
as an allegory for the city's continuing reunification as the dotted
lines that marked sections of, mostly S-Bahn, track under recon-
structionwere recurrently replaced with the bold lines of operating
routes. It visually represented the excitement that was felt, perhaps
most persuasively, by Berlin's transport enthusiasts, at the pro-
longed physical reconnection of the network, which was only truly
completed with the closing of the last gap in the Ringbahn in 2002.
The Ringbahn's octagonal shape continues to underpin the map's
composition today, reflecting the undivided whole of the city's
central area. As Spiekermann has indicated, a design's cultural
appropriation is a measure of its success and less than ten years
after its introduction his map started to be playfully and creatively
altered. One of the first alternative versions of the map, released to
mark the U-Bahn's centenary in 2002, implicitly acknowledged the
relationship of Spiekermann's design to the New Berlin by replac-
ing its station names with humorous substitutes deemed to better
reflect the German capital's cultural scene.86 The map has since
been acknowledged as an important symbol of German unification,
and Spiekermann has claimed that ‘the historical effort that fell to
me and my agency was to bring together the two halves of the
city.’87 It should be noted, however, that their attempts to achieve
this ‘historical effort’ were not guided by a comprehensive design
programme in itself but instead relied mostly on their professional
concern for consistency across numerous individual projects, which
eventually combined to create a cohesive corporate identity.88
The design briefs handed to Spiekermann and MetaDesign not
only reflected BVG's desire to communicate a newly reunified
system but also their wish to convey a controlled environment. This
objective was all the more significant given growing public concern
over safety on the city's public transport around the time of German
unification. In this sense Spiekermann acknowledged the reciprocal
nature of working for BVG.Megacity Mobility Culture: How Cities Move on in a Diverse World, Berlin, 2013,
185e206.
84 This colour can still be seen on the city's taxis to this day.
85 See Colomb, Staging the New Berlin.
86 See Anonymous, Exklusive: Hier ist der U-Bahn-Plan für das Neue Berlin,
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 February 2002 (Berlin supplement), 1.
87 J. Ansley, Pioneers of Modern Graphic Design, Hong Kong, 2004; quoted in
Krüger, Die Berliner verkehrsbetriebe im wandel der zeit, 55.
88 Quoted in Kinross, conversation with Erik Spiekermann, 32.
S. Merrill / Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 76e91 89[M]ost of the people in this studio use public transport. So we
design for ourselves. We aremaking the environment of, say, the
underground system slightly more bearable.89
Thus he noted that his corporate design practice enhanced not only
the image of public transport but also enhanced experiences of its
use, specifically in relation to deterring vandalism. But concern over
public safety, particularly within the U-Bahn network, was not
simply the consequence of the appearance of disorder that
vandalism embodied.90 It was also connected to events and cultural
representations that highlighted that the identities in transit that
arose as a consequence of unification were not always benign.
At around midnight on Friday 20th November 1992 a squatter
and left-wing activist named Silvio Meier was stabbed and killed in
the U5 Samariterstrasse U-Bahn station, after confronting a group
of youths who outwardly identified with the far-right. Soon
newspaper headlines highlighted the political nature of the murder
and emphasised the escalating conflict between the city's right-
wing and left-wing groups.91 The press quickly framed the
murder as an example of the countrywide wave of high-profile far-
right violent attacks and a result of increased neo-Nazi organisa-
tional membership e phenomena that have since been interpreted
as a consequence of German unification.92 While racially and
politically motivated attacks occurred in Berlin's transport infra-
structure on both sides of theWall before 1989, their increase in the
early 1990s led the U-Bahn network to be increasingly perceived as
a realm of fear and a site of social conflict between competing
political, cultural and ethnic identities.
That such ruptures had particular resonance in the U-Bahn was
illustrated by the network's frequent use, both at the time and
retrospectively, as a setting for cultural representations that aimed
to convey the social tensions evident in the years surrounding 1989.
Thus, after 1989 the U-Bahn network was not only a landscape of
euphoria: it also gained a reputation for being one of aggression
and violence. This reputation was not altogether unwarranted, and
statistics from between 1988 and 1993 show that the general in-
crease in the number of ‘aggressions’ registered was more pro-
nounced in the U-Bahn than in any other mode of public
transport.93 While this can be partly explained by the growth in
ridership following the city's reunification, it was still perceived
unfavourably by the public, as revealed by a 1994 BVG telephone
survey. The survey's results showed that security at night was the
second most negatively rated factor about the network after ticket
prices. 47% of the women and 19% of the men surveyed said they
did not use BVG services at night, and only 21% of respondents over
60 stated that they were not afraid to use public transport.94 These
were the perceptions that Spiekermann and MetaDesign were
called upon to help improve.89 Quoted in Kinross, conversation with Erik Spiekermann, 31.
90 As framed by the then prevalent criminological theory of the broken window
effect.
91 See S. Fein, Links gegen Rechts: Der 1. Tote, Berliner Kurier, 23 November 1992,
Front Page.
92 See B. Westle and O. Niedermayer, Contemporary right-wing extremism in
West Germany: ‘The Republicans’ and their electorate, European Journal of Political
Research 22 (1992) 83e100; L. McGowan, Much more than a phantom menace!
Assessing the character, level and threat of neo-Nazi violence in Germany,
1977e2003, Journal of Contemporary European Studies 14 (2006) 255e272; L.
Weissbrod, Nationalism in reunified Germany, German Politics 3 (1994) 222e232.
93 BVG chart of ‘Aggressions against passengers and staff’, Transport for London
Historical Archives, LT000156/180/01. A peak of 612 ‘aggressions’ against passen-
gers was recorded in 1990.
94 C. Jeschke, Angstraüme in stadten o€ffentlicher nahverkehr und sicherheitsbe-
dürfnisse, in: E. Giese (Ed), Verkehr ohne (W)ENDE? Psychologische und sozialwis-
senschftliche Beitra€ge, Tübingen, 1997, 165e172.Fears associated with underground railways were not, of course,
unique to Berlin in the late 1980s and early 1990s.95 But in Berlin
these fears and social tensions were uniquely filtered through the
lingering threat presented by Germany's National Socialist past and
its echo in the increase of far-right violence after 1989. Even before
unification, representations of the U-Bahn's landscapewere infused
with social anxiety. For example, the Grips Theatre musical Linie 1,
first performed in 1986 and adapted into a film in 1988, used the U-
Bahn to allude to an unresolved past and referenced the violence
and fear that characterised the network at that time.96 In one of its
scenes a U-Bahn carriage becomes a site of political confrontation
when four widows of fallen Wehrmacht officers extravagantly
reinterpret Germany's Nazi past in a positive light, drawing the
opposition of a solitary older female passenger who identifies with
the alternative left. This is evidence of a German variation on what
Johan Andersson has called an ‘archetypal scene’ involving the use
of underground railways as a metaphorical and physical setting for
confrontational social relations and interracial encounters.97
Similar motifs continue to be used to invoke Berlin's tense atmo-
sphere and the fears associated with its transport networks during
the immediate post-unification period, as illustrated by more
recent cinematic and literary representations. Andreas Kleinart's
1999 filmWege in die Nacht, for example, revolves around the post-
unification nightly patrols of its three main characters, who search
out and punish injustices that occur on the U- and S-Bahn,
including acts of racism and intolerance. Meanwhile Yade Kara's
2003 book Selam, Berlin employs a vision of Hitler travelling on the
U-Bahn to personify the threat of a resurgent far-right that sud-
denly makes the book's main character, Hasan Kazan (a Berliner of
Turkish descent), and others like him, feel more ‘Othered’, foreign
and threatened within the social upheaval of Berlin's reunifica-
tion.98 Thus by no means was the city's transport infrastructure
always considered as a positive symbol of the process of unifica-
tion: it was also emblematic of its localised darker side-effects.Conclusion
In the years after 1989 Berlin's municipal railway infrastructure,
through its (re)connection and (re)branding, allegorically reflected
the differing durations and protracted process of the city's reuni-
fication while providing platforms for the interaction of different
groups of people in ways that, for Berlin and its populace, gave rise
to and aided the construction of new and more unified forms of
identity. In the same period, however, the U- and S-Bahn also
indexed social conflicts connected to the broader geopolitical pro-
cesses of Germany's unification. These ruptures showed that while
processes at the municipal level emphasised the unification of
identities, experiences of the infrastructures themselves often
involved persisting divides. Thus these infrastructural landscapes
helped to construct, but were also subverted by, the new identities
that emerged against a broader background of ideological, political,95 In the same period the New York Subway became a symbol for the city's urban
crisis. See M.W. Brooks, Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York, New
Jersey, 1997.
96 On this and the other cultural representations mentioned, see Manicke, Berlin in
Transit(ion).
97 J. Andersson, Variations of an archetypal scene: the Paris Metro confrontation in
Michael Haneke's Code Unknown, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31
(2013) 693e707. This scene can be traced to 1960s and 1970s American cinema
before spreading to French cinema in the 1980s and 1990s.
98 A similar device is used in C. Aridjis, Book of Clouds, New York, 2009; also see
Pepe Danquart's Academy Award-winning short-film, Schwarzfahrer, which uses
Berlin's tram network as a setting in which to consider the racist and far-right
legacies of the country's past and older generations.
90 S. Merrill / Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 76e91
Fig. 9. A U-Bahn train on a viaduct above Scho€nhauser Allee in October 1991. In the foreground a newspaper banner advertises the New Berlin while in the background graffiti
declares ‘Speculators Out!’ Source: SLUB/Deutsche Fotothek. Photograph by Gerd Danigel.
100 Berliner Verkehrsbla€tter, Kurzmeldungen S-Bahn, August 1997, 167; for more on
The Love Parade, see J Borneman and S. Senders, Politics without a head: is the
“Love Parade” a new form of political identification, Cultural Anthropology 15 (2000)
294e317; S, Nye, Love Parade, please not again: a Berlin cultural history, Echo: a
Music-Centered Journal 9 (2000) available from: www.echo.ucla.edu/.social and economic change.
The ‘identities in transit’ sketched by this article highlight the
value of approaching infrastructure as landscapes that are both
constructions and constructors of multi-levelled cultural identities
e not just national but also municipal and individual. They also
serve to demonstrate that the role of infrastructure in the pro-
duction of cultural identities is anything but static and should not
only be investigated during discrete moments nor solely with
respect to uniform and abstract subjectivities. Of course, out of
necessity this article has been selective in demonstrating its argu-
ments primarily in relation to a particular and exceptional period,
but at the same time it has attempted, where possible, to histori-
cise its analysis. The investigation of additional pre-unification and
pre-WWII examples can highlight further how Berlin's U- and S-
Bahn have shaped and been shaped by the city's collective and
individual identities, but these could not feature in detail due to
space restraints. The competing infrastructural heritage projects
carried out in West Berlin and East Berlin to mark the city's 750th
anniversary in 1987 are a case in point. Similarly, the network's use
by the National Socialist regime through, for example, prestige S-
Bahn construction projects timed for the 1936 Olympics, the
prevalent display, as in all public spaces and buildings, of the
swastika or the racist controls that prevented public transport's use
by Jews and other persecuted minorities, should not be ignored.
Likewise, from the mid-1990s, these networks have continued to
respond to and shape evolving manifestations of the New Berlin
and its New Berliners in ways that reflect the city's contradictory
status as a playground for not just counter-cultural creative
experimentalism but also international capital investment and
speculation (Fig. 9).99 For example, in 1996 special fares were
introduced for the Love Parade, the same year in which the elec-
tronic music festival that had taken place annually on the99 U. Lehrer, Berlin: capital of contradictions, International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research (2013) virtual issue available at http://www.ijurr.org/virtual-
issues/berlin-capital-contradictions/.Kurfüstendamm since 1989 was relocated to the Tiergarten due to
overcrowding. To aid the transition in 1997, the Tiergarten S-Bahn
station was officially renamed Rave Garden, albeit only tempo-
rarily.100 Another renaming, this time in 1996 saw the Kochstrabe
U-Bahn station become Kochstraße-Checkpoint Charlie as paid for
by the American investment corporation that had purchased
former borderlands in the area from the Berlin senate in 1992, in
order to build the ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ business centre.101 The
project was abandoned in 1997, but the Checkpoint Charlie suffix
remains on the station's signs today, aiding tourists but also subtly
reminding passengers of the unfulfilled promises of the city's
reunification.102 The perspectives of the raver and the speculator,
alongside those of the ‘Wessis’ and ‘Ossis’ outlined above, should be
complemented by further analyses of other ‘Others’, ethnic and
(sub) cultural, and be brought to bear on, and thus complicate
through nuanced contextual and historical specificity, the previ-
ously favoured abstract identities and subjectivities of the passen-
ger and commuter.
The process of reunifying Berlin's municipal and individual
identities continues today, and after twenty-five years scholars still
refer to the so-called ‘Wall in the Head’ e a phenomenon reflected
by voting patterns in the last national election.103 In fact, beneath
the city's streets in some of the disused tunnels of the U-Bahn the
subterranean Wall still stands, as insurmountable as it ever was,
and elsewhere passengers fail to notice as they pass artistic101 Berliner Verkehrsbla€tter, Kursmeldungen U-Bahn, June 1996, 120.
102 For more on Checkpoint Charlie, see A, Luescher, Refashioning no-man's-land:
urban image politics and the visual dimensions of democracy, Cities 19 (2002)
155e160; S. Frank, Der Mauer um die Wette Gendenken: Die Formation einer Heri-
tage-Industrie am Berliner Checkpoint Charlie, Frankfurt/Main, 2009.
103 See Barnstone, The Transparent State; Colomb, Staging the New Berlin.
S. Merrill / Journal of Historical Geography 50 (2015) 76e91 91installations that mark the old underground border. Susanne
Ahner's hidden public artwork “Übergang zur Untergrundbahn”
[Passage in the Underground], realised in 1999, marks the former
subterranean sector boundaries that were crossed by the U8 and
U6. At these points sixty-nine signs display words beginning with
the preposition über in order to play on vertical imaginations and
forge associations with the Wall and its fall. They include: überall
(everywhere), überwacht (monitored), and überholt (obsolete).104
These historical and artistic traces act as physical, metaphorical
and psychological barriers and markers in the city's unconscious e
‘buried memories’ of the network's earlier division.105 They lend
credence to Habermas and others' early concern that German
unification relied too heavily on ideas of an assumed shared heri-
tage, rather than the sharing of cultures with two different back-
grounds.106 The possibility of a single homogeneous municipal
identity for Berlin, as argued above, is itself a trick of the mind, not
least because of the growing multiculturalism experienced in West
Berlin since the 1970s and across East andWest since uni cation.107fi
Perhaps, then, the city's transport infrastructure is one of the
closest reflections of a shared identity, albeit it a shallow one, that
Berlin and Berliners can ever expect to achieve. In this sense it
continues to fulfil unifying and integrative functions, at least when
it comes to the identities of former East and West Berliners. The U-
Bahn's most recent extension, due to be completed in 2019, will
connect an epicentre of the former capital of the DDR, Alex-
anderplatz, to the new governmental heart of the unified city via
the U5, the only line to have been extended in East Berlin following
WWII. This is a further effort to bring the East and its identities into
the fold and an additional spatial metaphor for the continuing
process of the city's reunification.104 See Berlin Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, Kunst im Stadtraum, 2002.
105 See Merrill, Excavating Buried Memories.
106 J. Habermas, National unification and popular sovereignty, New Left Review 219
(1996) 3e21; Blacksell, Partition, die Wende, and German unification.
107 See A. Huyssen, Nation, race, and immigration: German identities after unifi-
cation, Discourse 16 (1994) 6e28.Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the encouragement and advice offered
by Lucy Maulsby and Carlos Galviz, the organisers of a session on
Urban Infrastructure and Civic Identities that took place at the
European Association for Urban History's twelfth international
conference on urban history in Lisbon in September 2014, where an
early draft of this article was presented. I would also like to extend
my gratitude to the attendees of that session, for their useful
comments; the Association itself for granting the author a regis-
tration bursary to attend; and the staff of University College Lon-
don's Department of Geography, in particular Richard Dennis and
Andrew Harris, and of Technical University Berlin's Center for
Metropolitan Studies, in particular Dorothee Brantz and Hans-
Liudger Dienel, for their invaluable and continuing support. I would
also like to thank Sandra Jasper for reading a late draft of the article
and suggesting additional relevant references. Finally, I would like
to acknowledge all those interviewed e especially Stefan Kohl e
and the archive staff that contributed to the collection of the pri-
mary material presented here. This article benefited considerably
from the enthusiastic and constructive comments provided by
three anonymous reviewers and the Journal of Historical Geog-
raphy's editor, Miles Ogborn. Funding for this researchwas received
from University College London's Graduate School and the German
Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) [A/13/70209].Dr. Samuel Merrill's current research interests include: the historical and cultural
geographies, and urban and transport histories, of underground railways; the social
memories and cultural landscapes of subterranean urban infrastructure; and the
alternative heritages and counter-memories of online and offline subcultural groups
and social movements.