Revisiting Berlin

...To someone who watched the Wall go up and daily reported on the grief it caused, the potential for Central Europe now that Fascism and Communism have been relegated to the dustbin of history is breathtaking...

...There is no word yet on a date for construction of the new United States Embassy at its prewar site near the Brandenburg Gate...

...The upgrading of an airfield is, of course, only peripheral to the momentous things that have happened in Berlin since I came here as a fledgling correspondent too many years ago...

...These were would-be refugees...

...And it is harder to believe that the currently scaffolded Reichstag will actually be rebuilt and ready for occupancy by the spring of 1999, so that the German government can usher in the millennium from its monumental pre-Nazi home...

...Younger people generally appear to have adjusted more comfortably to the fact that Berlin again has a single identity...

...Not far away, just beyond the famous Unter den Linden Boulevard, is Alexanderplatz, the closest place East Berlin had to a Times Square and, long ago, the throbbing heart of the entire city...

...The barbed wire that over the next weeks and months would be replaced by a concrete barrier 10 to 13 feet high, had been installed during the night...

...The East continues to suffer consistently higher unemployment levels and worse home maintenance problems...

...I too lefta valise, stuffed with memories, in the former (and soon-again-to-be) capital of Germany...

...As an American protected by the Allies' postwar four-power agreements, I was able to drive unobstructed into and around the Soviet Sector onAugust 13,1961,theday the city was split in two...

...Similarly, the old East Berlin standby, the Berliner Zeitung, is trying to expand its circulation in the more well-to-do former western sectors...

...Many were still there the next day, having slept on the ground...

...To some extent, it is a generational divide that perpetuates an inner-city dividing line where none any longer exists...

...Large, mind-numbing blocks of Communist era structures define its boundaries, and it has only one smallish cafe that mostly services guests of the remarkably undistinguished Forum Hotel towering over the square...

...The city remains overshadowed commercially and spiritually by Hamburg, Munich and Frankfurt, as it was during the Cold War...

...It is preparing for the day two years from now when the Parliament and all the ministries and central agencies of the German government will move from the sleepy town of Bonn, their location since shortly after the end of World War II, back to the true Hauptstadt They will be returning to the center of Berlin, where part of the Wall stood, and just east of it...

...But finally they realized they had no choice other than to drift back home and cope with the consequences...

...But unlike 3 million others who had fled westward from Communist oppression over the previous few years, they had waited several hours too long...

...Tasteful antique shops and other upmarket emporiums can still be found on West Berlin's famous Kurfurstendamm...

...Indeed, although it is most noticeable in the former Soviet Sector, there is a strange malaise in all of Berlin...

...A huge number of people, traveling alone or in small groups, filled the square to its outer limits...

...It is also suffering withdrawal pangs because of sharp reductions in the inflated subsidies its social and municipal services used to receive from the Federal government for being a special case...

...It is in America's interest, and in the interest of European stability, to have the former Communist countries of the East succeed in their complicated transition to democracy and to a market economy...

...Strangely, though no longer a site of despair and fear, Alexanderplatz does not really seem to be a much more joyous or carefree place today...

...Their path to freedom blocked, the tardy Fluchtlinge were afraid to return to the homes they had abandoned...

...That German influence is already being strongly felt in those countries is not considered a challenge by the State Department...

...Now the Berlin Wall is history, and the famous Checkpoint Charlie East-West crossing point is a construction site...

...It remains a large expanse of concrete, with a central fountain and a few trees on its perimeter...

...The Polish border is just an hour from Berlin by car...

...For both a restored Berlin will not only provide a model, but will be much closer geographically and culturally than Bonn to Poland and the Czech Republic on Germany's eastern border, as well as to Hungary a bit farther away...

...But they are flanked these days by Häagen-Dazs, Foot Locker and Eddie Bauer, while Kempinski's and Kranzler's, the great Kudamm cafes of bygone years, look shabby and depressing...

...From the looks of the chaos at Potsdamer Platz and along Friedrichstrasse, it is hard to credit official declarations that the work is proceeding on schedule and the whole complex will be finished by the summer of the year 2000 at the latest...

...At Alexanderplatz a scene of surreal intensity vividly testified to the gruesome effect of the Wall on ordinary individuals...

...Except for people making their way to the underground subway station in the square, or the elevated subway station right outside it, everyone here seems just as lost—albeit not so painfully—as the frustrated refugees did 36 years ago...

...The eight years since the Wall was torn down appear not to have been long enough for Berliners to assimilate current realities and feel they are participating in a potentially dynamic revival...

...Tourists still gawk at a relic warning, "You Are Now Leaving the American Sector...

...Though the Gemanden Markt in the East is one of the most exquisite squares in Europe and agreeable crowds converge on the cafes at Kollwitzplatz at night, people are generally more affluent in the West...

...Some say the trouble is that Berlin has not yet fully found itself...

...It was hermetically divided, and its western part was physically isolated, for almost three decades...

...So they squatted out in the open in Alexanderplatz, their faces masks of hopelessness and anxiety...

...But the embassy staff will surely be pleased to be based in a worldclass city when the day comes...

...The lock on that metaphorical suitcase snapped open the minute my plane touched down at Tegel, once a small airstrip in the French Sector of divided Berlin that today is the reunited city's main airport...

...Their departure was likely to have been brought to the attention of the Volkspolizei and they were liable to be imprisoned for treason...

...Shortly after I arrived, the Russians authorized the Communist rulers of their East German puppet state to undertake the most radical experiment ever in urban redevelopment: the erection of a virtually impenetrable barrier, patrolled by armed guards and fronted by free-fire zones, down the middle of the biggest metropolis between Paris and Moscow...

...Much of that area is at present a chaotic assortment of deep holes in the ground, thanks to the wrecking crews that were turned loose...

...This in the city where once the adventurous Bauhaus movement flourished...

...As one informed American observer put it, "The last thing we want is to have to worry about these new democracies ourselves...

...Some sat on old suitcases they had brought...

...EVEN YOUNG Berliners, however, have difficulty focusing on what's happening...

...Norman Gelb, author of The Berlin Wall, was the Mutual Broadcasting System correspondent in Berlin during the building of the Wall and immediately after...

...They had left their homes in East Berlin or East Germany that morning, eager to walk across the sector border into West Berlin and start a new life...

...Efforts to level the playing field have not been very successful, but they persist and are even accelerating...

...Most of the tearing down has been completed, but little of the building up has begun...

...But other on-site placards tout the area as about to become "one of the most attractive business addresses in Europe...

...The only sparkle in the last few days has been provided by a punk-looking young man with a portable electronic organ-like instrument who briefly fills the square with the glory of a Bach fugue...

...Others, clutching tied bundles of possessions, wandered about aimlessly but obsessively...

...Their city is literally experiencing an upheaval...

...Westie" newspapers like the Morgenpost and Tagesspiegel have added downmarket sections calculated to increase their circulations in the eastern part of the city and help change attitudes...

...Berlin has a key role to play: If this reborn German capital shortly emerges as the gleaming phoenix, and if its traditional cynicism can assimilate the fact that the past is truly past, it could very well become the center of balance in 21 st century Europe...

...Other vestiges of Wall-related disparities remain as well...

...Washington has more important reasons, though, for welcoming the prospect of the German capital returning to Berlin...

...Many among the middle aged and elderly, victims of anEast/Westmind set, cling to old distinctions...

...Its modern terminal offers more luxury items for sale than used to be available in the whole Soviet Sector...