Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin The Fighting Spirit Of West Berlin Berlin This has been a quiet summer in Berlin. There is no. longer the tension of the Blockade. The perhaps...
...Interesting and important is the work of the Investigating Committee of Free Jurists, headed by Dr...
...He himself once had a narrow escape when two cars with Soviet agents tried to box him in...
...Walther Schreiber, and two Social Democratic members of the city administration, Hans Hirschfeld and Paul Hertz, who have spent some years in America and are ardent admirers of The New Leader...
...Theodor Friedenau, which operates as a kind of Civil Liberties Union-in-Exile for the Soviet Zone,, attracts over a hundred visitors to its police-guarded Zehlendorf headquarters every day, and reports on acts of oppression...
...Factory assembly lines are rolling again, and such traditional industries as electrical products, clothing and printing are exporting to markets in West Germany and abroad...
...Only 36,000 foreign tourists visit Berlin every year now, as compared with 200,000 before the war...
...With thousands of letters and hundreds of visitors from the Soviet Zone every month, RIAS is primed with first-hand material for broadcasts which reach not only the Soviet Zone but also the western areas of Poland and Czechoslovakia...
...But there is a brighter side...
...in this huge capital, which covers an area of 350 square miles, the amount of devastation exceeded that in all other German cities put together...
...Freedom is winning in the divided capital, as two facts indicate: The movement of refugees is strictly one-way, from East to West...
...But, like most-West Berliners, he goes right on fighting...
...Most of this is covered, in one way or another, by the Federal Government...
...Its "warning lists" have exposed many Soviet informers and would-be infiltrators...
...Unemployment is heavy and is swelled by the constant influx of new fugitives from the Soviet Zone, who are coming in at the rate of about 300 a day...
...The city runs a deficit economy to the amount of almost $300 million a year...
...Berlin has already achieved what should be the relationship between all free Germany and the Western powers: a sense of alliance and comradeship...
...The feeling of not being alone, of being closely associated with the whole free world, is an important factor in keeping up the will to hold out and rebuild in the face of formidable handicaps...
...I was given a clear picture of these handicaps in talks with the Christian Democratic Burgermeister of Berlin...
...According to Dr...
...The division of the city, and its dependence (except for air communication) on transportation lines that run through the Soviet Zone, are other disadvantages...
...Berlin's reconstruction started after that of West Germany, and it has been a hard pull to make its industries competitive...
...Production is higher (about 80 per cent of the 1936 figure) and unemployment (down to 190,000 from a high of over 300,000) is lower than at any time since the war...
...The perhaps exaggerated hopes aroused by the heroic uprising of June 17, 1953 have subsided...
...RIAS, the Radio in the American Sector, under the competent direction of Gordon Ewing, is a thorn in the side of the Soviet Zone puppet rulers...
...What remains very much alive in Berlin is the spirit of freedom...
...And the inspiring voice of Ernst Reuter, with Adenauer probably one of the two outstanding personalities of postwar Germany, has been forever stilled...
...This is kept up by a number of organizations and institutions...
...As against the Soviet Sector's great showpiece, the Stalin-Allee, with its long rows of apartment houses above shops, West Berlin presents a picture of citywide rebuilding, with a record figure of 18,000 housing units in prospect for 1954...
...The mood in the Soviet Zone has again become one of apathetic resignation, of adjustment to a hated regime from which no escape is visible...
...West Berlin has a special spirit of solidarity and of friendliness toward foreigners which is the result of being right under the muzzles of Soviet guns...
...American aid, which amounted to several hundred millions in 1950 and 1951, has diminished to $25 million a year, mostly used for credits to job-creating industries and for emergency work programs...
...Destruction in Berlin is on a gigantic scale...
...The city has lost the big income that formerly accrued from its status as national capital...
...And the West Berlin unemployed do not vote Communist—or apply for jobs in the Soviet Zone...
...Friedenau, there have been 34 registered kidnapings and 98 "trappings" by ruse since 1949...
...But the high drama of Berlin as the island of freedom behind the Iron Curtain still makes the city a fascinating place to visit...
...The Free University, with 6,700 students, 2,300 of them from the Soviet Zone, is another outpost of freedom...
...This is one city where anyone who tried to chalk up an "Ami Go Home" sign would be extremely unpopular and where American help in reconstruction is always given credit...
Vol. 37 • August 1954 • No. 34
