Mr. Mayor

In a chamber still decked in mourning, 120 West Berlin assemblymen met one day last week to elect a successor to the late great Ernst Reuter, mayor of West Berlin. Waiting in the anteroom behind a brace of glowing cigars were two rival candidates: Deputy Mayor Walther Schreiber, 69, a Christian Democrat, and Socialist Otto Suhr, 59, chairman of the assembly. The votes were cast and counted, and for the first time in three years, the "great coalition" that united Berlin behind Reuter's Socialists broke asunder. The right-wing parties (Christian Democrats and Free Democrats) split with their Socialist allies and elected Walther Schreiber, 62 to 57.

A balding, tired-looking lawyer who came close to defeating Reuter himself in the last mayoralty election (TIME, Jan. 29, 1951), Schreiber grew up on a farm in the Harz Mountains. He fought in the Kaiser's cavalry in World War I; the Nazis sacked him from his post as Prussian State Minister of Trade and Commerce; in 1945, Soviet Marshal Zhukov bounced him from his job for opposing the Communists' "land reform" program.

Mayor Schreiber will hold office until December 1954. His biggest headaches: 1) 208,000 unemployed out of a total population of 2,000,000, 2) a constant stream of refugees fleeing from the East zone, 3) a threat by the Socialists, Berlin's largest party, to go into active opposition. Schreiber is well aware of the danger of political disunity in a city that is still an island in a Red sea. He knows how to get along with others. A Protestant, Schreiber helped Catholic Chancellor Konrad Adenauer found the Christian Democratic Party that now rules Germany. A free-enterprising conservative, he served as Reuter's trusted deputy in the Socialist-dominated coalition that ruled Berlin through blockade and airlift. But Schreiber, a born No. 2 man, lacks the Chancellor's stature, and so far he has shown little of the fine soaring optimism that was Reuter's greatest asset in keeping Berlin free.

To his friends in the assembly, Schreiber confided last week: "Despite everything, I have always been lucky." He would need much more than luck to lead West Berliners, who, Ernst Reuter once said, must every day "live like heroes."

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