On a Sandy Plain

Three years ago, soldiers from the Volga and the Mississippi, the Thames and the Loire met by the Spree, in the ruins of a harsh, unlovely city situated on the vast plain on the edge of Europe's Slav lands. The city was Berlin. The soldiers brought to it both fear and hope. Since then, fear has grown like weeds amid the debris; hope has been carted off like rubble. Last week from Berlin, TIME Bureau Chief Emmet Hughes cabled this report:

The Price of Civilization. Spring has come early and generously to Berlin this year; the sweet-scented lindens touch fragrant fingers to form graceful arches. But Berlin's people breathe the dust of ruins--ruins that have a kind of awful majesty. There is the burned, bombed hulk of the Reichstag with the crows napping foolishly around the beheaded statues on the roof, and the icy stench of a tomb breathing over its bricked-up entrances. A few blocks away along the Wilhelmstrasse, the granite walls of the battered Reichs-chancellery are plastered with neat, wheedling Communist posters: "Mothers, for the happy future of your children, vote S.E.D." Chalked on the famous balcony is this bitter beatitude: "Blessed are the dead, for their hands do not freeze."

Any evening after dark, follow a Berlin policeman on his route. For some time nothing out of the ordinary will happen; he waves his stick at a 14-or 15-year-old prostitute who has strayed from her normal beat; or he wakes a P.W. just returned from Russia who is sleeping in a doorway--merely to check his papers. But after a while you will see him stop by a tree on a corner. He will remove a score of little slips of paper pinned there. They read: "Want bread, offer German cigarettes . . ." "Will sell linen tablecloth and curtains for money or food . .." ". . . Discharged P.W. wants pair of pants; gives money or potatoes." This is illegal barter, but every neighborhood has its own Brotbaum (bread tree). Berlin in this spring of 1948 is undeniably a city--but the life of a great part of its people could never be confused with civilization.

Not 20 minutes from Berlin's dead center is a slice of Long Island or California civilization--the American colony. This week the local baseball season got into full swing; Tempelhof airbase invited all American girls to the "Stateside Stomp" in the Skyrider Ballroom; everything from keel boats to canoes and kayaks is skimming the Wannsee's smooth, sunny waters. This is little America, APO 742-A, including bingo, jukeboxes, dog shows, fashion shows and horse shows.

Local society sparkles with such festive gems as the one recently reported in the community's own chatty weekly: "Last Thursday night the WACs held a dinner party at the Club 48 and what a time was had by all! . . . The steaks were good! In fact they were so good that some of the guests sat through a double feature . . . This is the way it is done, kids. Eat your steak as quickly as possible . . . get rid of the dirty dishes somehow, allow your face to relax into a half-starved, neglected expression . . . and sit back and wait."

The Price of a City. This week a U.S. official said: "Berlin is on Moscow's shopping list. If the price is cheap enough, the Russians will wrap it up and take it."

Life in Berlin is almost too dear to be worth living. Two pounds of bread are $15, a pound of coffee $100 (on the black market). How much is the city worth?

It had cost its conquerors untold blood and pain. But now, quotations are confused. Direct bargaining between East and West is deadlocked. The conquerors no longer meet in the Allied Control Council: this highest official level was sliced away when Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky walked out last March 20 (TIME, March 29). Until this week, however, they still met in the lower-echelon Kommandatura, charged with the day-to-day business of running the capital. Here, each fortnight, white-haired Soviet General Alexander Kotikov rose to read an hour-long prepared indictment of the Western powers, then comfortably settled his 215 pounds in his chair and looked blank and bland while U.S. Representative Colonel Frank Howley crisply replied. Then Kotikov would read another rehearsed document on a totally different subject.

Into this political never-never land, the great and moving issues affecting Berlin's fate barely penetrated. Endless have been the battles over the seven Nazi war criminals jailed in the great red brick fortress of Spandau, in the British sector. Should butter patties be given to prisoners dangerously losing weight? Shall ex-Reichs-bank President Walther Funk's kidneys be operated on inside the prison or in a hospital outside?

Last week, during a twelve-hour session, the deputies debated whether the Russians had actually charged that American soldiers had "bitten old ladies" in Berlin streets, or whether the Russian interpreter had meant "beaten." The matter was referred to the nonfunctioning Control Council. Next day, the Russians announced that they would be unable to attend the next Kommandatura meeting either.

Such haggling never distracts the Russians from their more serious efforts to cut down Berlin's price. Economic strangulation is advancing steadily, but it is a slow process. Terror is a faster weapon. While Russian propaganda screams that U.S. forces have kidnaped 40,000 Berliners, while it warns in black newspaper headlines BERLIN IS NOT CHICAGO, the MVD proves its mastery of the arts of Capone and Beria. Warning phone calls, threatening letters, shadowing agents are merely the trivial daily nuisances that plague anti-Reds. The MVD's serious work is executed in a garish, blue-grey house on the Kupfergraben through which hundreds of Berliners have passed, to be recorded as "disappearances."

The purpose of this terror is simply to corrupt Berlin's brain and conscience, to destroy the value Berliners put on their lives, their homes, and their city. Terror has allies. Lesser and more ordinary suffering has corroded untold values. In countless brains and consciences, all political debate is held worthless. A typical newspaper cartoon this past winter showed a child pointing to a pile of cut timber: "Is that wood for our fireplaces, Daddy?" "No, son, it is for conference tables."

Berlin's democratic party leaders feel their own special frustration, caused by the high wall that still rises between them and their Western conquerors. It is built of a thousand tiny brick-hard facts: the OMGUS documents that never speak of Germans but only of "indigenous personnel'' ; the terse little signs in official buildings that designate which toilets the "indigenous" shall use. I talked this week to one of the most courageous Socialists in Berlin's City Assembly. He said: "You are rightly suspicious of us and we have yet to prove ourselves. But it is difficult for us too. Often we do not feel like humans. We become objects--the ground over which you and the Russians are fighting. We are 'indigenous.' "

A sad Christian Democrat leader not long ago confessed: "If Berliners read the American licensed press, they see the Russians described just as Goebbels described them. If they read the Russian licensed press, they find the Americans described as Goebbels painted them. What do you expect them to think?"

The Price of Freedom. Yet neither hunger nor terror nor intellectual rootlessness, nor the thousand sights that might seduce the weak to despair, have been able to stifle a spirit which values freedom. Said Town Councillor Ernst Reuter: "It may be that Berliners will not be able to make the final decision. But without them, Berlin would have had to be written off long ago."

This was not wholly true. Berliners were not all heroes. There were still the sulking anti-Semites, the sneering ex-Nazis, the small gang of scavenging black-marketeers. There was the blind, pathetic young lawyer who recently assured a friend of mine: "Yes, democracy is the way. What we need now is a strong man to lead us along this new path." But some understood about the price of freedom.

This May Day, in the Soviet sector, Communists had summoned their legions with the usual warnings, and with promises of free sausage and schnapps. On Unter Den Linden, out of the ruins' cavernous darkness, loudspeakers blared their tinny recordings of the Internationale. But this world ended at the Brandenburger Tor. On the Western side, before the ruined Reichstag, 120,000 Berliners assembled in quiet defiance of Communism. Behind and above them towered the massive Russian iron soldier atop the Soviet war memorial; at its base, Russian officers stared sullenly at the crowds. The thousands cheered Union Leader Ernst Scharnowski as he said: "We who love our freedom cannot be bought for vegetables and schnapps." Said C.D.U. Unionist Eduard Bernoth: "It took the Allies to free us from the brown dictatorship. It will take the courageous will of freedom-loving Berliners to save us from dictatorship of another color!"

On either side of the Reichstag steps, on which the speakers stood, ambulances and nurses were in attendance for those who fainted from hunger. Only a few did --mostly aged women.

But it would take a great deal more than the courage of hungry Berliners to keep Berlin's price too steep for Soviet pockets. It would take the steadiness and quiet resolution of the American military commander (to date, exemplary). It would take the effort of countless lesser officials who, despite the vagaries of American policy, continue their little-publicized work of rebuilding Berlin trade unions, newspapers, subways. It would take, also, the resolution of thousands of American men & women who, despite their suburban comfort, belong to this same Berlin which is ringed by enough Soviet tanks and planes, thinly veiled from view, to hurl a major offensive toward the Rhine.

To date, the Soviet Nervenkrieg has not moved one out of 25 American "dependents" to pack. Many have stopped boating on the Wannsee and buying antiques, have gone to work in German hospitals instead. "Do not be afraid!" the American licensed press told Berliners two years ago, urging them to vote against Communism. "The rumor has spread that the Americans and British will leave . . . How unfounded!" Berliners believed it and voted down Communism. Relying on the U.S., they are gambling with their lives, 100 miles inside the Iron Curtain. A U.S. retreat from Berlin's ruins would mean that the conscience of the West has been outflanked.

In this bewildering city of ruins and lilacs, Buicks and rubble-trains, prostitutes and patriots, eye and mind struggle to summon order and sense from disorder and madness; they seek for symbols. The great statue of Frederick the Great, still boxed in brick against bombs that have not fallen for three years--is this the city's sly hint of new German militarism waiting another chance? The great Soviet tank on the Potsdamer Chaussee, mounted on concrete--does it mean something that it faces out from the city, pointed westward? The American signs--are they unintentionally pointed in announcing: "Think, act, drive carefully--the life you save may be your own"?

The city tells us only one thing that is plain: its price is not merely the price of some desperate rubble, or even of three million German lives; it is, in large measure, the going price of freedom in spring, 1948. This great tomb of Naziism (and of the West's brittle illusion that you could do business with Communism) stands on the sad, sandy Brandenburg plain to test, perhaps for all time, the West's will and worth.

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