Berlin

on the World Today

FOR ten months, the world has watched with wonder the gigantic “iron lung” of air transport that safeguards three million people in Berlin against physical starvation and political extinction. Meanwhile a drama equally compelling is taking place in the mind and body of the city which lies protected by ihe four-engined Skymasters.

First and foremost, the city of three million has two governments, two police forces, two sets of laws and regulations. Under Soviet protection, the so-called “Opera Magistrat” (because it was constituted by the Communists in the State Opera House) rules one million people, without ever having been elected to do so. It was nominated by the Soviets in fact, by the German Communists in theory, and it includes representatives of the bourgeois parlies which the Soviets tolerate.

Its head, the “Opera Bürgermeister,”is Friedrich Ebert, son of the first President of the Weimar Republic. Rumor hath it that Ebert is desperately unhappy in his position, but cannot change it because he is a virtual prisoner of the Soviets, who selected him for the propagandist value of his name.

In Western Berlin, the government elected by the people on December 5, 1948 (the Soviets would not let their sector vote), is headed by Ernst Reuter, a courageous, pugnacious Social Democrat who spent some time in Hitler’s concentration camps before he managed to emigrate to Turkey. Above Reuter, his city council, and the city parliament stands the Allied Kommandatura, once the fourpower governing board of Berlin, now continued on a tripartite basis by the three Western military governments.

Reuter keeps law and order with a police force headed by quiet, scholarly Johannes Stumm. The police chief of the Soviet sector is the swashbuckling Paul Markgraf, baker’s boy, professional German soldier and officer, stooge of the Russians ever since his capture at Stalingrad. Stumm has radio cars and the support of American, British, and French military police to assist him; Markgraf relies on ruthless Communist rowdies and the sinister Soviet secret police, whose kidnaping forays terrorized the town until the Western powers and the Berlin population developed more adequate means of protection. Both governments and both police forces claim sole jurisdiction over the city; both of them exercise it in their respective territories.

Berlin’s paralysis is far from total, but the encroachments of the disease are everywhere. Coal shortage in the Western sectors (airlifted coal is carefully apportioned between electricity, transport, and essential industry) forces the subways to stop running at 6 P.M. The elevated railways are under Soviet control, and are still powered by coal from the rich lignite fields of the Soviet zone.

No return

Cars with license plates from the Western sectors are intermittently seized by the Soviets in their area, so that auto traffic is much reduced. Although Germans can legally move freely back and forth between Eastern and Western Berlin, no resident of the American, British, or French sector goes into the Soviet one without a cold apprehension that he may be arbitrarily arrested by the Communistcontrolled “people’s police” and never return.

Residents of the Soviet sector live in never ending dread of that fate. Anywhere in the Soviet sector, its inhabitants or visitors may have their parcels or brief cases summarily confiscated. This favorite pursuit of the people’s police is designed not so much to accumulate material wealth in Communist coffers, as to create the endless insecurity that turns first into apathy and finally into capitulation before the political will of the Soviets.

Western Germany is unattainable for all except those few hundred Berliners in the Soviet zone who every week can get on the American or British commercial planes, or have the even rarer good fortune to ride military aircraft, or have the nerve to cross the Soviet border and the means to bribe the guards.

Idle factories

Industry is largely lame. The coal and materials the airlift can supply to Western Berlin are not enough to support even the modest level of production that had been attained before the blockade. As yet there is relativity little unemployment, because many workers have been shifted to maintenance work, to rubble-clearing in their factories, and to other makeshift pursuits. Even the Soviet sector industries, with the non-blockaded hinterland of the Soviet zone available to them and the relentless Soviet hunger for reparation goods driving them, have been retarded because they cannot tap essential sources of supply in the West.

Thus Berlin, once the leading manufacturing city of Germany, has a deficit economy, first because the Soviets drain the Eastern sector, secondly because the blockade prevents the Western sectors from producing.

Out in a sandy-brown waste in the British sector lie the Siemens electrical goods factories, which were to Germany what General Electric is to America, an enterprise so vast that its plants in Berlin are gathered together into the complex known as Siemensstadt (Siemens City). The mass of red-brick buildings bears witness to the double indemnity that Berlin industry has had to pay to the West which bombed it and to the Soviets who blockaded it. The shattered panes, the burned-out walls, and the tangled piles of scrap at the foot of rusted immobile cranes are reminders of the assault from the air; the heavy stillness of the place drives home the fact of blockade.

Across the road are the workers’ apartments, their dead white walls flecked by bullet marks and dirtied by the grayness of neglect. At its edge, Siemensstadt runs out into settlements of tiny brick huts or tar-paper shacks, each with a microscopic garden plot attached, where bombed-out Berliners supplement their income with small private harvests. The giant of industry has been crippled, and his dependents must fend for themselves.

Empty wharves

Railways and waterways, the suppliers of industry, are also victims of the siege. The great Westhafen (Western Port) of Berlin, where a year ago barges arrived from the British zone via the Elbe and Havel rivers, is inactive. The Soviets stopped the barges at Wittenberg on the Elbe at the same time that they stopped the trains. Unloading cranes are idle, except when a few mechanics test them for their serviceability in better days to come, and the great piers and storage rooms are almost empty. Only the Osthafen (Eastern Port) still receives food and coal barges from the Soviet zone, via the Oder and Spree rivers.

American travelers who arrived on boat trains from Bremerhaven at the Lehrter Bahnhof would today find neither noise nor smoke at the terminal; only the “elevated” station at the lower level is in operation. Bahnhof Zoo, just off the famous Berlin zoo and the fashionable Kurfürstendamm, is as quiet as the station in Lichterfelde-West, which the American forces completed for their use just a few months before the military (and then all) trains stopped coming into Western Berlin. Only the Schlesischer Bahnhof, where luxury coaches for Communist dignitaries and third-class trains for Soviet troops start on the road to Bresl-WarsawMoscow or to Saxony and Czechoslovakia, and the Stettiner Bahnhof, with its traffic to the Baltic ports, show any sizable activity.

Inhabitants of the Western sectors, cut off from land communication, depend for life and work on three airports. Tempelhof belongs to the Americans. Here the Kaiser’s special troops once paraded, and many of them attended services in the adjacent German military chapel or were buried in the adjoining military cemetery. Hitler built huge, coldly impressive troop quarters and air operations buildings at the field. Workers who today live in the apartment buildings on Tempelhof’s fringes are as worried about the low-flying planes as the pilots are about the fiveand six-story houses.

Gatow, the British held, lies in the flat, open countryside, providing less mental hazard to the fliers but more difficulties to the truck companies that have to haul its incoming freight. The newest airport, completed in early winter, is located in the French sector, leveled from an expanse of choppy, sandy wasteland next to a stagnant canal. The held still looks like a barracks camp, lit for night work, rather than a finished modern airport.

Two hours of electricity

Electricity is always scarce, because not enough coal can be flown in. Electric refrigerators are useless, electric stoves at least impractical, battery sets preferable to plug-in radios. The owners of electric generators form an accidental aristocracy, on whose houses friends who must make shift with the candle ration or with kerosene lamps are apt to descend. The turning-on or turning-off of lights serves as the signal of standard time.

Unless they are fortunate enough to reside near an Allied colony and to be hooked into its power net, the Germans who live in the three Western sectors have current only two hours a day. Lamp fuel and candles are tightly rationed and too costly for the majority of Germans to buy on the black market.

The Soviet sector, on the other hand, suffers under none of these shortages. The big power plant of Berlin, klingenberg, lies there, and it is adequately fed from the coal mines of Upper Silesia.

The Soviets are calculatingly generous with current — for example, they have instructed the shops to stay lit at night in order to propagandize the superior comforts of their sector. However, except for a few bright boulevards, the Soviet sector after twilight presents the same pattern that the Western ones do: gloomy streets with sparse lamps, shadows of macabre ruins, desolation in blackout. Only one place in Berlin is brilliant : the Soviet Kommandatura on Luisenst rasse.

Cigarettes are money

The black market continues to play its integral part in Berlin life. Its classic commodity, the American cigarette, is not (as is generally assumed) provided principally by the American troops or civilian officials. Far greater quantities come through Poland, which buys them from the U.S.A.

An American wandering through the Soviet sector at night, in what he thinks is adequate disguise, may get a shock when he passes a dark doorway and hears the hissing sound “Amis,” which is German for “Americans.” It does not mean that he has been found out; it means that some black-market peddler in Polish employ is offering him, in the midst of the Soviet sector, American cigarettes.

The Poles have driven the price of good tobacco down; still there are even larger quantities of cheaper cigarettes sold through Soviet-controlled black-market channels. Stella, Orient, and other brands have been lumped together in city jargon as “the poor man’s Chesterfield.”

Despite the blockade, Western Berliners are smoking more and eating better these days than they did before the restrictions necessitated by the blockade set in.

The average ration card is good for dehydrated potatoes, black bread, a pound of meat a week, about half that much fat, some noodles and farina, and frequent special rations of dried fruits and vegetables — a terribly monotonous diet, but not an unhealthful one. Practically everyone supplements it by purchases of fat, meat, and potatoes on the black market.

Eastern Berliners have profited indirectly from the blockade. Their Soviet masters, keeping up with Western competition. have raised their rations too. Nevertheless, the bread is less wholesome, the cereals cruder, and the meats poorer than those which Western Berliners get.

It is significant for Soviet methods that Western Berliners who draw their rations in the Soviet sector — the Soviets made this possible some months ago to support their claim that they could run the city by themselves — get better food than people who live in the Soviet sector.

Getting the news into print

Berlin enjoys a lively, aggressive press, made up of no less than sixteen daily newspapers, eight appearing in the Soviet sector, eight in the Western sectors. These papers lash out at each other across the East-West line, even though Soviet sector newspapers are forbidden to circulate in the Western sectors and vice versa.

Although the Soviets can bring in paper freely, while the West has to airlift all its newsprint in, the Western papers enjoy a vastly larger total circulation. The Berliners have little use for Communist propaganda. They regularly shut off the news and political broadcasts of the Sovietcontrolled radio and turn for their information to the Americanand British-sponsored stations.

The Western Berliners have made a clear choice between West and East, and no rhetoric is needed to confirm their decision. When Communist agitators start to peddle their propagandist wares on the subway or in the street, a dozen quick tongues and irate temperaments are on hand, first to ridicule and finally to silence them. The people are tired, and they’ seem to shuffle rather than walk; they are poor, and gray is the predominant clothing color; but they are clear in their heads and unbroken in their spirit.