Historian Nora Kaschuba, with skill and insight, takes the reader back to West Berlin in the early 1950s. The city, having stared down Stalin during the period of the Soviet blockade in 1948-49, still faced enormous difficulties. Housing was desperately in short supply, unemployment was rife, and refugees fleeing from the East were arriving in large numbers, so putting a strain on resources and the local population. All of this was compounded by the city, encircled as it was by the Soviet backed GDR, being effectively an “island” separated from the West.
Its mayor, Ernst Reuter, well understood the difficult situation the city was in, and the reality that daily life for its inhabitants was a struggle. In order to address the people of West Berlin and inform them of how he and his administration were dealing with the problems the city faced, in 1951 Reuter began broadcasting the radio programme, Wo uns der Schuh drückt – Where the Shoe Pinches.
In the broadcasts Reuter established an informal and almost personal channel of communication with the people of the city. More than this, though, thousands reached out to their mayor in letters asking for help and assistance, and he used his programme as a means to directly address their problems and concerns.
It is from the surviving scripts and recordings of the broadcasts, and the correspondence of the people of West Berlin, that Nora Kaschuba reveals a snapshot of the political and social conditions of West Berlin in the early 1950s: poignant in the words of Ernst Reuter, and underscored by the words of the people who lived there.
Format
PDF:
First Edition, September 2025
© 2025 Ueberschwarz Pty Ltd
© 2025 Ernst Reuter Archives Foundation
ISBN 978-1-922686-12-1