The Shape of Nothingness

GERMANY The Shape of Nothingness

Is the U.S. going out of business in Berlin? TIME Berlin Bureau Chief Enno Hobbing revisited the city last week after a four-month absence. His report:

In the Western sector of Berlin on a summer morning of 1948, General Lucius Clay cast the die: "We will stay in this city." Clay's fighting faith mounted into the thunder of the airlift. And with their will, Berlin's people tipped the scales of decision; the Russians lifted the blockade when they realized that Berliners would not be intimated.

"Balance Your Budget." Today the memories of the struggle dissolve into melancholy. In the fifth month of the post-blockade "peace," Berlin is a city deserted by power, prosperity and purpose. At Tempelhof airport, where 15 big airlift transports landed every hour night & day, a few senile C-47s snooze in the autumn sunlight. On the grass between the runways, once jammed with quartermaster trucks and mobile canteens for hungry flyers, there sit stacks of hay.

"I can understand," said a Berlin journalist, "that America won't waste planes as long as trains run into Berlin. But aren't you going to do anything with Berlin now that you've won it?"

The Allies apparently plan to do little. They have left small staffs behind to run Western Berlin as though it were simply 2,000,000 people. U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy makes only short visits to his OMGUS office. The halls of the building that was Clay's command post echo" now to the irrelevant footsteps of janitors, shuffling past nameless doors.

U.S. generosity has departed with U.S. power and personnel. To the West Berlin city government the Allies barked, "Balance your budget!" A second blow was an order ending U.S. direct subsidies. Henceforth Berlin must get its help from the new West German government at Bonn.

Jobs for Tag Stickers. Over Berlin's ruins the ivy still grows, but long stretches of the city's streets have been cleared. Street-corner lawns that had been stomped into shabbiness flourish again. Under the grey frown of gutted facades on the Kurfu"rstendamm are rows of fancy-front, one-story shops.

But the city's lifted face is a deception. Ask any Westberliner. He'll tell you that the grass was seeded and the rubble cleared by men made jobless by the blockade, and that the sparkling shops are near bankruptcy.

There is a growing army of futile door-to-door peddlers. Every day in apartment houses, Sfeuerbeamten (tax officials) stick tags on pianos, couches, chairs, attaching them for unpaid taxes. A third of the tenants are behind on rent.

One in every four of West Berlin's workers is jobless: a total of 250,000. At the beginning of the blockade the total was 50,000; at the end, 150,000. In five months of "peace,"' 100,000 more have lost their jobs. Why is this?

Half of Berlin always lived from the city's service functions as the capital of the Reich; the other half from its concentrated industry. The capital disappeared in the defeat; 85% of the factories were grabbed by Russia in 1945.

Trading with the Pigs. Frau Weimann, 40, reflects the toll on human nerves. "I'm glad when my husband is out; he's so on edge." Franz Weimann lost his job when the blockade ended. To Buckow-Ost, a pastoral suburb, he moved his family of four. Their home is a two-room brick shack in a tiny garden. "How could we pay our old rent of 50 marks ($11.90) when unemployment compensation is 120 marks?" Frau Weimann asked. "This week my husband gave me 15 marks; we're all supposed to eat on that." The 250,000 unemployed families live like the Weimanns; another 250,000 get by perilously on small insurance pensions.

Most West Berliners today "trade with the enemy." They turn in their hard West marks at six to one for soft Soviet marks, then buy in East Berlin. A gaunt worker, castigating the Reds, growled about "die Schweine" (the pigs), but he had just got a haircut in the Soviet sector. "Berliners value freedom," a German paper editorialized, "but they can do little with it. They have only the hungry freedom of the unemployed."

In 1945, mind and heart in Berlin's raw, garish ruins were fixed on sheer survival. During the next four years the Germans pushed through poverty to positive goals, to a fierce fight for freedom. Today, in a humdrum autumn of pointless peace, hope has departed and "normalcy" takes the shape of nothingness.

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