Berlin: 'Status Quo Minus'
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
PERSPECTIVES Berlin: 'Status Quo Minus' By William Henry Chamberlin More than a hundred years ago, the phrase "Bleeding Kansas" made its impact on the American national...
...One very experienced and levelheaded American observer with whom I talked during a visit to West Berlin this summer, Robert Lochner, director of RIAS, the American broadcasting station in West Berlin, is convinced that quick action to clear away the first strands of barbed wire would have involved no Soviet intervention...
...Although it has slowed down the former flow of hundreds of refugees a day to a small trickle, it has not improved or even stabilized the rickety East German economy...
...If they are dissatisfied, it is not because they fear that the Western powers might go too far and precipitate a conflict, but rather because they feel too little is being done...
...As Brandt said to me in his office in the Schoeneberg Rathaus, scene of so many big meetings and demonstrations during the stormy history of the divided city: "There is reliable information that Khrushchev thought the wall would be the end of free Berlin...
...But there must be firmness, clarity and consistency in the attitude of the protecting powers and, above all, no toleration of any Soviet efforts to intrude into the present administration of West Berlin...
...It has now been proved that West Berlin, with its 2.3 million inhabitants the largest city in free Germany, can live with what Mayor Willy Brandt calls "the status quo minus," the previously existing situation plus the wall...
...For it was inevitable that people would try to escape from Walter Ulbricht's huge concentration camp, however great the risk, and that the sympathies of the West Berliners would be passionately on the side of the fugitives...
...The West's permitting the wall to go up constituted a retreatwhether justified or not is a question that will probably be long debated...
...PERSPECTIVES Berlin: 'Status Quo Minus' By William Henry Chamberlin More than a hundred years ago, the phrase "Bleeding Kansas" made its impact on the American national consciousness...
...In any case, it is clear that passive toleration of the wall has not relieved the tension in Berlin...
...So long as the wall and all it signifies in human suffering, separation of families, and murdering of defenseless refugees remains, there can be no question of the Soviet authorities having any rights or privileges in West Berlin, which is now exclusively a three-power responsibility...
...The erection of the wall in August 1961 clearly violated two provisions of the existing fourpower agreement on Berlin: that movement within the city be unimpeded, and that no German armed forces be permitted in Berlin...
...Today it is Berlin, divided by what Germans call the Wall of Shame (Schandemauer), that is bleeding...
...Although there was some movement out of Berlin following the erection of the wall, thousands of young people have come to Berlin and economic conditions in the city have been developing quite normally...
...The wall itself, an eight-foot structure, sinister in appearance, built of cinder blocks and rubble, topped with barbed wire, is a hideously appropriate monument to Communism...
...but more, especially young people, have come in...
...Guerrilla war between pro- and anti-slavery forces began there years before the fatal shot was fired on Fort Sumter...
...on the contrary, it has aggravated it...
...Every conceivable method of escape has been tried, swimming across the Spree and Havel rivers, shanghaiing excursion boats, burrowing under the wall, jumping from the windows of houses that face on West Berlin...
...And there is not the slightest notion of appeasement among West Berliners...
...Tunnels have been built under the wall, and tunnels will continue to be built," a top West Berlin police official told me...
...but the Soviet Union cannot expect to exercise absolute power in East Berlin and to claim any rights or privileges in West Berlin...
...We are in a position to make Berlin a bigger industrial and cultural center than it has been in the past...
...We would be glad to have a united Berlin under four-power sponsorship...
...Production has increased...
...Some people left after the wall was put up...
...and every new incident at this grim barrier adds emotional fuel to what may some day be a fateful explosion...
...He has already been proved wrong...
...Busy and prosperous West Berlin remains a vivid contrast to the drab poverty and want of the adjoining Communist-ruled part of the city...
Vol. 45 • September 1962 • No. 19
