Warm-Up

The best (i.e., warmest) place to be in Munich on a Sunday morning is in bed. Nevertheless, 8,000 Munchener got up early, waded through ice slush and jammed into the huge, drafty tent of Germany's famed Zirkus Krone. When it finally started, the performance under the Big Top proved altogether worth the early risers' trouble. It was only thin little Socialist Dr. Kurt Schumacher making a speech. But he spoke up to the Allies in some of the boldest language yet used in public by a German in defeated Germany.

Memo to Peacemakers. Schumacher addressed himself chiefly to the Deputies of the Big Four Foreign Ministers in London, who were about to start work on the crucial German and Austrian peace treaties (to be written in Moscow in March). Said he: "In the end, one must tell the Allies that total war also means total responsibility. . . . We are living ... in all disgrace and all privation of moral and spiritual qualities. ... To the German people this period . . . seems like an eternity of misery and hunger. . . ." Schumacher credited the Allies with many positive accomplishments in Germany, but criticized them for not "knowing what they really wanted to do. . . ."

In an oversimplified, cleverly demagogic argument, he scoffed at the idea that German nationalism might ever again become dangerous. Said he: "It will never become a danger to the world [except] as the instrument of a victorious power against other victorious powers." In a pointedly anti-Russian passage, he promptly played one victorious power against another: "We recognize Russia as a piece of Europe. . . . But the thing against which we ... always will defend ourselves is the attempt to transplant cultural and political conceptions to German soil."

The Russian zonal press growled that the audience had reacted with paraphrase of Nazi slogans to a Hitlerite speech; but three days later Russia permitted its pet party, the Communist-run SED, to blurt out an announcement of a Russian new deal in the Soviet zone. Some of the promises: reduction in reparations from current production; a 200-300% increase of the zone's industrial level; abolition of the lowest ("starvation") ration card. Meanwhile, the Russians also appeared to be softening somewhat (at least on the surface) in London.

No Answer. In their notoriously gloomy Lancaster House, the Deputies got on more affably than ever before as they warmed up for their most important task to date. Around the table in the small, green-walled chamber sat: the U.S.'s Old Germany Hand Robert Murphy and Austria's Military Governor General Mark Clark; Britain's Sir William Strang and Sir Samuel Hood (who, as No. i civilian official in the British zone, is Murphy's opposite number); France's sleek, conciliatory Maurice Couve de Murville; Russia's deadpan, English-speaking Fedor Gusev, and Byelorussia's Kuzma Kiselev.

Gusev munched on each procedural point with his usual grim relish. But he went along with the U.S.-British idea that a central German government should be created to receive the peace terms, and dropped his dilatory demand to discuss Austria only after the German peace was settled; henceforth, the fate of Austria would be taken up in the mornings, that of Germany in the afternoons.

Experienced observers in London kept their fingers crossed. One thing that made them wonder whether Russia was taking the conference seriously enough was the smallness of the Soviet delegation. Another dark omen: when the conference secretariat issued a list of delegates' names and telephone numbers for the convenience of party-givers, the U.S., Britain and France each contributed between 20 and 30 names and numbers of willing guests. The Russians listed only Gusev and Kiselev; their telephone numbers were not given.

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