West Berliners at first saw little of the economic growth transforming West Germany. Well into the 1950s, the standard of living was not greatly different on the two sides of town: most people were fairly poor, and they did what they could to profit, legally or otherwise, from the juxtaposition of two currencies and two economies. It is also important to remember that in the postwar years, even after the airlift, many Germans took seriously the GDR’s aspirations to be the “antifascist” German state, a place open not only to Communists but to all who wished to build a new Germany unlike the
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