Berlin

In a purely superficial sense West Berlin is becoming more “normal,” more mundane every day. Cut off from its natural hinterland, blockaded and bullied by the Communist East Germans and the Russians, deprived of its status as capital city, Berlin was the last place in West Germany to recover from war’s destruction. Its scars healed slowly, but now, at last, the gaps in the brash facade of the Kurfürstendam are being closed. The vast mounds of rubble in the city’s center are finally being tidied up. The palatial villas in Wannsee and the Gruenewald have sprouted from shells submerged for years in tangled undergrowth. Berlin has added a look of solid prosperity to the old snap, sparkle, and rambunctious humor which lasted through its years of trial. And behind the look is the reality of an amazing economic performance.

The Berliners have retained an intense eagerness to work. In West Berlin it is not uncommon to see builders at work at 6 A.M., knocking off for a mere twenty minutes for breakfast and a half hour for lunch, willingly putting in a ten-hour day. Enthusiasm permeates down from the city administration of Lord Mayor Willy Brandt, whose officials think nothing of staying at their desks until nine in the evening. In West Berlin the “German economic miracle” has not yet lost any impetus. Industrial production during the last three years there has risen 25 percent faster than in the rest of the Federal Republic as a whole.

Today Berlin’s fashion houses set the pace for West Germany; Berlin is the center of the nation’s food-processing, printing, and electrical industries. The complex of the Siemens electrical combine has become the biggest single concentration of industry in Germany.

Berlin boom

The force of the Berlin boom has overcome the city’s isolation. Fifteen years ago there were 300,000 unemployed Berliners out of a metropolitan population of 2 million. Today there is full employment, and Berlin recruits 18,000 workers a year from West Germany. In all, nearly 100,000 West Germans have come to Berlin to work. The city’s exports have quadrupled in a decade. Berlin has the best road network of any German city, with one unique feature — the city autobahn, with sixty miles of dual highway. In fifteen years 280,000 homes have been built, and one in three Berliners now lives in a post-war building. The city administrators have plans for the demolition of 56,000 slum dwellings.

The Reichstag has been raised from the ruins to which it was reduced in 1933 when Hitler took power. All of its offices are in use, and only the main assembly hall remains to be completed. Schloss Charlottenburg, once the home of the House of Brandenburg and Prussia, has been restored to something like its eighteenth-century splendor. In the Tiergarten Park a new national gallery and a new city library are going up. A “cultural center” is planned near the Potsdamer Platz, and there are blueprints for major additions to the universities.

This prestige building is planned with an eye to the reunification of Berlin, and therefore a Congress Hall and a Philharmonic Hall of Musichave been built as near as possible to the Brandenburg Gate, which marks Berlin’s geographical center and which stands directly above the Wall. The old “diplomatic quarter” will be rebuilt in the Tiergarten to house the foreign embassies which every Berliner hopes will someday return. West and East Berlin architects actually meet clandestinely to discuss long-term plans for the city center. This may in time turn out to be the most productive collaboration of the years of Germany’s division.

There is a dark and stagnant aspect, however, of the West Berlin situation. The population has hardly grown in the last twenty years, and at 3,400.000 for the whole city, stands a million lower than its pre-war peak. The population has been growing older; one in five is over sixty-five years old, against one in nine in the Federal Republic. West Berlin is still dependent on financial aid from the Federal treasury, now close to 2 billion marks out of a City budget of 5.4 billion marks. Even though it contains woods, lakes, and some agricultural country, Berlin inevitably exhales a feeling of claustrophobia, chiefly because of the Wall, which marks its fifth birthday in August.

The Wall, after five years

Unlike the abstractions in the political division of Germany, the Wall is an everyday factor in people’s lives. It prevents them from moving freely about their city, from seeing friends and relatives whenever they wish, from aiding East Germans who want to seek refuge in the West. The Wall breeds frustration and bitter anger. At every anniversary of its construction, large crowds, made up mostly of young people, demonstrate at focal points along its western side. Virtually the entire West Berlin police force has to turn out to restrain concerted attacks on the Wall, for an assault would end with West Berliners being mercilessly mowed down by the machine guns of the East German People’s Police.

The Wall, stretching the whole distance from north to south down the middle of Berlin, has grown steadily more formidable. It now undergoes systematic modernization, and the East German authorities have even gone so far as to institute a competition, called Moderne Grenze (“modern frontiers”), for the best blueprints of a “new look” for the Wall. The competition closes this year, and the Wall is to be completely reorganized by 1970. So far about two miles of it, in chunks at key sectors, have been replanned.

Behind the Wall itself is a meshwire fence, about ten feet high. Then comes a strip of grass and behind it a trench six yards wide and six feet deep. In back of this obstacle, which is too wide for anyone but a trained athlete to leap over, is a second strip of grass, of a special kind; it stays flat for twenty-four hours after being walked on. Then comes a roadway for armored vehicles of the People’s Police, lit by arc lamps; and beyond, a 100-yard-wide zone, studded with watchtowers, patrolled by guards and Alsatian dogs, and backed by two more fences, one electrified.

The whole safety zone is at most points more than 250 yards wide, and in it the East Germans have installed visual aids and acoustic devices. All buildings have been razed to the ground. For propaganda purposes, the rusted barbed wire has been removed from the Wall at points where the East Germans bring their official guests. As one West Berliner put it: “They would really like to plant flowers at these places on their so-called Wall of Peace.”

The West Germans have set up an office which keeps an exact record of all crimes committed near the Wall, as well as along the interzonal frontier which runs through the middle of Germany itself. Since August, 1961, the West Germans have counted 5000 crimes, half of them involving the criminal use of firearms. The names of nearly 2000 East German offenders have been listed, and the West German law courts have instituted 750 prosecutions of persons “in absentia.”

At least sixty people have been killed at the Wall, some of them being “persons unknown” shot down too far inside it to be identified. East German guards who have proved to be crack marksmen are generally rewarded with 500 marks, a gold watch, and ten days special leave. The fortified Wall has reduced escapes to a trickle — last year about 1300 East Berliners in all reached the West, but usually across the long interzonal frontier; only a few dozen got across the Wall. At least another 3000 East Germans tried to escape but failed.

Chinks in the Wall

What can be done about the Wall? Heir Brandt believes in a policy of kleine Schritte — small steps toward a normalization of the situation. Something, indeed, has been achieved. East Germany has been induced to allow old-age pensioners to visit close relatives in the West, and since the end of 1964 about 300,000 have done so.

Conversely, since the end of 1964 there has been a series of “pass agreements.” under which a million West Berliners have passed through to the Communist side at crossing points in the Wall during Easter, Whitsun, and Christmas. Some West Berliners, too, can get through on “urgent family business.” Passes are given only to close relatives, up to first cousins. Last Easter more than half a million West Berliners applied for these passes.

Save in the regulation of these two forms of movement, official East-West contact in Berlin remains minimal. West Berlin is the scene of periodic talks on East-West trade, always carried out on the Western side by an Office for Interzonal Trade, which maintains the fiction that it is only semi-official. There are talks between railway authorities, for the East Germans retain control of the city railway throughout the whole of Berlin. There is some contact at cultural and sporting levels. Early this year negotiations of a peculiar kind took place in Berlin, when West Germany bought the release of an estimated 2600 East German political prisoners for, allegedly, 100 million marks.

Do arrangements of this sort imply widening chinks in the Wall? Or are they merely part of the pattern of spasmodic contact which has been going on for years? The question is difficult. On the Western side, opinion may be shifting away from rigidity. In April one West German political party, the Free Democrats, called for closer contact with the East Germans at legal, diplomatic, and economic levels, but the Free Democrats’ eyes have always been directed eastward. More significant is the Social Democratic Party’s proposal for serious discussion, on television and radio, between members of the East German and the West German legislatures.

Chancellor Ludwig Erhard’s Christian Democrats, the dominant government party, have been chary of climbing on any bandwagon for the relaxation of tension in Central Europe, yet on March 26 they, too, produced a shadowy peace plan. It repudiated Hitler’s 1938 Munich Agreement and called for a renunciation of nuclear ambitions by all non-nuclear members of the Warsaw Pact and NATO. This plan contained at least one useful concession to an Eastern European neighbor, Czechoslovakia, which has feared a re-echoing of German demands for a return of the Sudeten Germans to the fatherland.

Ulbricht loosens the reins

There have been signs of change in the political climate of East Germany also. An older generation of dyed-in-the-wool Communists is fading out. Their places in the hierarchy are increasingly being taken by younger men of the managerial type, or by technocrats whose main interest is in building up the East German economy, and who are less moved than their ciders by the passions of Marxist-Lcninist ideology. The young “managers” are becoming the driving force in industry; the technocrats are infiltrating the ministries of the East German government.

And it would appear that Walter Ulbricht, the real ruler of East Germany, has reluctantly decided to give this younger generation its head. Ulbricht is now in his seventies and in poor health. As the dedicated servant of the Kremlin, he is irreplaceable. In the last year he has been entrusting greater power to his two ablest lieutenants, fifty-threeyear-old Socialist Unity Party chieftan Erich Honecker, and fifty-oneyear-old administrator of the bureaucracy Willi Stoph. When Ulbricht goes, these two will no doubt try to maintain East Germany as the Soviet Union’s most subservient satellite. But they will not serve the Kremlin with Ulbricht’s unique blend of ruthlessness, political finesse, and total authority.

The younger generation has already introduced more flexible methods into industry, which, as in other Eastern European states, is going through a period of adjustment, entailing the discovery of enterprise, profit, and decentralization. Individual firms are being encouraged to give bonuses and other incentives to their workers. And it must be acknowledged that something like a minor “economic miracle” has been achieved by East German industry, which is lilting output by more than 6 percent a year and making particular progress in the fields of chemicals and heavy machinery. By comparison, East German agriculture lags far behind. The policy of nationalization of the land is universally unpopular.

Outspoken criticism

There is restiveness in East German intellectual circles. At least one powerful new critic of the regime is Robert Havemann, once a professor at the Humboldt University, and a socialist opponent of the Nazis who became a Communist after the war. Havemann has called for a basic policy reassessment by the Socialist Unity Party, involving recognition of bourgeois achievements and a synthesis between Marxist-Leninist philosophy and humanitarian socialism. He believes that a progressive socialist concept could become the driving force in a unified Germany.

Havemann’s ideas are not new. Similar ones were put forward ten years ago by the writer Wolfgang Harich, who was sent to prison as a dangerous apostate. It is a measure of the changing political climate of East Germany that Havemann has been allowed to voice His views for the past two years without being arrested. Nonetheless, two years ago he was stripped of his university professorship, and last Christmas Eve he was deprived of his post as head of the Academy of Science’s photochemistry group.

Finally, on April 1 he was ejected from dre Academy. But he has gone on saying what he thinks, and he has attracted some open support — from the poet Wolf Biermann, from the writers Stefan Heym, Peter Hacks, and Werner Brauenig, and from film directors Mactzig and Wischnewski.

Communist pressures relax

As a concession to growing restiveness, the East German regime in January sent a delegation from its newly formed Council for AllGerman Affairs to Bonn with a six-point plan for mutual recognition of both German states, disarmament, and normalization of East-West German relations. Bonn rebuffed this plan, yet in March, East Germany made another proposal: talks between the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) and the West German Social Democrats (SPD). The SPD did not turn this proposal down out of hand, but countered with the suggestion that all political parties in both halves of Germany should participate. The SPD called, too, for freedom of movement and of discussion throughout Germany. The ball was lobbed back to the East German court.

From these events West Berlin has drawn some fresh confidence. East German Communist pressure has been lessened somewhat. Communications are not being interfered with, and about the only offensive gestures from the East are the sonic booms of Soviet aircraft ostentatiously breaking the sound barrier over West Berlin (on April 6 a Soviet jet crashed into a West Berlin lake while executing this saucy maneuver). World developments such as the Sino-Soviet conflict and the war in Vietnam have probably helped to shift Soviet eyes from Berlin. But two larger factors are closer to home: the obvious interest of the Communist Eastern European states in relaxing tension throughout Central Europe, and their own growing independence of the Soviet Union. One way or another, West Berlin is not being squeezed because the Soviet Union finds it neither opportune nor worthwhile.

One result may be that West Germany will re-examine its traditional reunification policies. These have become petrified and have consisted basically in rearmament within the Western alliance, a boycott of East Germany and other Eastern European states, and the presumption that a strong West could eventually launch a diplomatic initiative that would somehow lead to German reunification. Despite these policies, today there is undeniable interest in Germany in improving relations with Communist neighbors, especially Poland and Czechoslovakia, and there is some readiness to accept existing frontiers and to begin to deal with East Germany. The emergence of the new class of manager-technocrats in East Germany means that the regime can survive the departure of Ulbricht, rendering less plausible than in the past the Bonn Federal Republic’s claim of sole responsibility for the whole German people.