Airport Terminals

Historical accounts of racial discrimination in transportation have focused until now on trains, buses, and streetcars and their respective depots, terminals, stops, and other public accommodations. It is essential to add airplanes and airports to this narrative, says Anke Ortlepp. Air travel stands at the center of the twentieth century’s transportation revolution, and airports embodied the rapidly mobilizing, increasingly prosperous, and cosmopolitan character of the postwar United States.

Berlin's Tempelhof Airport was opened in 1923 and, under Adolf Hitler, extended to become the world's largest airport which was finally closed in 2008. But even today Tempelhof Airport remains a place of arrivals and departures being used simultaneously as a refugee shelter and a leisure park for the inhabitants of Berlin. A historically unique moment for a portrait of this city within a city, but also of a European society in a state of emergency, caught between crisis and utopia.