WI Berlin never divided?

Thande

Donor
All right, as it's the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, here's a thought for you: what if Berlin was never divided in the first place?

Say instead at Yalta that the Soviets get all of Berlin (and Vienna) with no four-power commissions, and to compensate the Soviet occupation zones of Germany and Austria proper are a bit smaller. Perhaps the Soviets might leave Germany with a bit of Silesia and Pomerania at the expense of Poland just to ensure the eventual East German state is big enough to be feasible.

Anyway: no divided Berlin, which means no Berlin Wall, no Berlin Airlift and no "Ich bin ein Berliner" for a start.

How will the Cold War go differently?

Will Austria still be reunited and neutralised?

Without the Berlin Airlift, will the Cold War ice over so quickly?

Will there be fewer dangerous near misses due to no tank confrontations across Berlin?

What would East German culture be like with united Berlin as its capital?

Would West Germany still choose Bonn with the signal that they see Berlin as the capital of an eventually reunited Germany, or would they plump for a realistic capital like Frankfurt?

Discuss.
 

FDW

Banned
I'm going to ignore all of those suggestions while remaining on topic, the subject I'm going to talk about is the Berlin U-bahn and S-bahn, don't worry, they're very revelant to this disscussion. OTL with the raising of the Berlin wall, it's metro system was divided as well. To show how it was divided look here.] What this division meant was that Berlin essentially spent a decade after reunification simply rebuilding the system to what it was like Pre-wall, especially the S-bahn lines, which were put under a multi-decade boycott by West-Berliners. (They were owned by a East German Rail company.) Without this Boycott Berlin won't have to waste a decade putting it's system back together, and you may see many segments that still on the shelves OTL (U1 Ost, U4 Nord) get built, and some OTL segments (like U5 west) get built sooner than OTL. And you might see the streetcars remain in West Berlin. If there was one that Communist at least gave a damn about, it was providing proper public transit to their masses.
 
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Susano

Banned
That means mainly:
1)no special status for Berlin. Of course for Eats Berlin that status was de facto abolished anyways, and East Belrinf ulyl integrated into the GDR, but in West Berlin it was kept. Few people realise it, but West Berlin was never part of the FRG. It was an own entity, under the suzeranity of the three western powers and associatzed with the FRG (it sent delegates to the Bundesrat, but they had no voting power). This contributed majorly to the counterculture that then developed in West Berlin. For example, those wishing to flee conscription went to West Berlin, where they could not be arrested for that, and of cours ethe general flair attratced more, err, alternative people. With a fully Soviet/GDR Berlin, that all wont happen.

2) and of course, one potential WW3 flashpoint less, thus much less tensions between the blocs, most likely.
 
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