American Landscapes and German Labor: Building Columbia House Officer's Club at Tempelhof Airport in Post-World War II Berlin

Part of a larger dissertation project on airport infrastructure, empire, and mobility in mid-twentieth-century Berlin, this poster presents a detailed and complicated story of the continuity of municipal administration and local labor practices in Berlin under U.S. military occupation. In 1945, two months after the fall of Berlin to Soviet forces, U.S. Army Command commissioned the design and construction of an officer’s club and mess hall, Columbia House, in the unfinished main terminal building at Tempelhof Airport. Responding to a bid by the Berlin Airport Authority, a local Berlin architect promptly drafted a set of meticulously detailed drawings of finely appointed quarters that contrasted starkly with the ruins and rubble of the captured capital city. While the total project took several years to realize, the officer’s club, Columbia House, became the center of U.S Air Command in the center of occupied Berlin. It now stands under historic preservation in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The centerpiece of the poster is a set of stunningly detailed drawings rendered by local Berlin architects, as well as the call for bids, and conflicting wage tables issued by both the Airport Authority, using pre-war figures, and the U.S. Military Command in Zehlendorf, which sought to normalize higher wages across the U.S. and British occupied zones. Contrasted with the ruinous state of Berlin’s built and social infrastructure, the precise architectural renderings reveal a latent yet strong professional sector eager to begin rebuilding the devastated city while also capitalizing on new opportunities of a destroyed city.

While Carolyn Eisenberg has argued that the occupation of Berlin and the division of Germany was the result of a convergence of conservative, anti-Communist U.S. interests, a close reading of the documents surrounding the Officer’s Club, including U.S. Army Command communications, Berlin Airport Authority memos, as well as the architectural renderings, wage labor records, and individual reports from airport administrators reveal a much more complicated story of competing agendas, miscommunication, and shifting levels of agency. Evidence suggests that there was never a monolithic U.S. military politic that set the agenda for Berlin, or Germany. There were, rather, subsets of people – Germans, Allies, Soviets – with specific affiliations, interests, and ideals for the future.