Berlin,
Unknown photographer – © Newspapers.com, reproduced with permission
When my friend Alfred Friedel comes off duty it’s usually somewhere around one o’clock in the morning.
For Alfred is a newspaperman. And morning newspapermen the world over live like owls.
Take a good look at Herr Friedel as he walks briskly across the open forecourt of the huge horseshoe-shaped “Telegraf ” building in the Grunewald (it used to Herr Hitler’s Labour Ministry). He is a slim, energetic 40, moving jauntily inside a double-breasted grey suit, a top coat, and a beret, all of which have seen plenty of hard wear.
He loiters for a moment, lights a cigarette, and checks his watch as if waiting for something. Then, apparently satisfied, he raps with his knuckles on the glass of the porter’s lodge and an elderly night-watchman, reading a “Telegraf” still wet and smudgy from he press, answers with a sleepy “Guten nacht.”
Herr Friedel turns up his coat collar and steps out into the night.
Outside Grunewald is sleeping peacefully. It is a respectable good-class suburb where well-to-do families once lived in respectable houses shaded by tall lime trees. Some of the houses are still there. And on this night of full moon the lime trees throw 1ong shadows across the road like fat, accusing fingers.
Alfred Friedel carefully avoids the shadows. He moves in and out, keeping always in the light, like a child playing hop-scotch, walking briskly all the time.
At the far end of the street, where this backwater of Berlin suburbia suddenly intrudes into the blazing two-mile strip of neon they call Kurfurstendamm, is the tram terminus.
An all-night tram is standing there, impatient to be off. For the driver, a Prussian giant with a Kaiser Wilhelm moustache and a huge turned-up fur collar to his uniform which makes him look like an old-time Junker general, has just thrown away his cigar butt and is climbing ponderously on to his platform.
And as the tram jolts into shuddering life again Herr Friedel swings himself aboard.
Nice timing, you would have said. As if he had the whole manoeuvre timed to a fifth of a second. Which, as a matter of fact, he has.
For, like so many people in West Berlin today, Alfred Friedel is a marked man. As he puts it to you jauntily. “I’m unpopular with the Russians.” What he means is that some time back, he wrote an article criticising Russian foreign policy in the Far East.
So now his name is on a blacklist in a filing cabinet somewhere east of the Brandenburg Arch, which used to be the Hyde Park Corner of old Berlin.
Some day, he knows, they will try and get him, just as a few months ago they got his friend and colleague, Herr Krugel, “snatched” in the street on his way home from the office, rushed across the “frontier”, and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment on a charge of “endangering the peace.” Which to him is as good as a life sentence.
So it means that, although he was born only a couple of miles away in what is now East Berlin: although most of his friends still live there, Alfred dare not take so much as a bus ride into that other Berlin.
If he writes he knows that his letters are opened and the contents carefully noted. If he manages by a trick to put a telephone call through the chances are that the wire is “tapped.” The other day his mother died and was buried in a churchyard in East Berlin. But he dare not even visit her grave.
His only “escape route” to the outside world is by air along the neutral corridor. But since air travel is expensive to a German he rarely makes the trip.
So Alfred Friedel, a busy man, an important man, foreign editor of a widely read newspaper, lives marooned on a German island three miles square surrounded by a Russian sea…
There is nothing quite like it anywhere else in the world, and if you have not seen it for yourself it is hard to believe. Yet here are the two halves of a great city living side by side, yet divided, split in two.
Here is a population of several million people all calling themselves Berliners. Yet one half is not supposed to know — and is certainly not allowed to say — how the other half lives.
In each half-city they pay their way in marks. But East Berliners who try to spend their Eastmark in West Berlin find that it is only worth one-sixth of a Westmark.
A boundary more formidable, more rigid than an old-time city wall gig-zags across Berlin. It is maintained with ferocious topographical accuracy. In part of North Berlin the dividing line runs down a single street. The houses in that street are technically in East Berlin. But their front doors open into West Berlin. So to seal that natural loop-hole the Russians last December ordered those front doors to be bricked up…
If you live in East Berlin you cannot telephone to a friend two streets away in East Berlin. Your letters to the West take five days and are rigorously censored.
And yet here is the absurdity of it. Sixty thousand East Berliners go to and from their work in West Berlin, and 90,000 West Berliners work in East Berlin. They travel on the same underground railway, over the same bus routes.
Those East Berliners working in the West take 23 per cent of their salary in Westmarks and the rest in Eastmarks. And the profit from this tortuous piece of currency exchange helps to subsidise the price of bread in West Berlin.
Add to this the 200,000 illegal refugees living in West Berlin who don’t officially belong to one side or the other and you have as frantic a picture of man-made chaos as was ever perpetrated on a civilised community.
But the Berliner is naturally tough — in many ways, even down to his mordant, salty humour, he resembles the Cockney.
And, just as during the worst days of the blitz the Londoner boasted that he could take it and proved that he could, so the Berliner is taking it now: has been taking it, in fact, for eight years.
He is digging his toes in, determined to make a good job of it. And a thundering good job it is, too. For one thing, production in West Berlin factories is already 30 per cent above the 1939 figure.
As we walk down the Kurfurstendamm, Albert Friedel points to the stream of new cars slipping in and out of the heavy traffic like minnows. Eight per cent more cars were sold in West Berlin last year than in 1939. About one Berliner in 14 now runs a car: whereas in 1939 the ratio was one in 22.
They are feeding better and living better: about as well as we were in Britain a couple of years ago, I should say.
Somehow, even in that wilderness of destruction, they have managed to find homes for 80,000 families in new apartment houses. And as I walked across the replanted Tiergarten, the beloved “Hyde Park” of Berlin, I watched men planting new trees and finches busy nesting again.
And if you ask them when all this started they will point to that rainbow-arch in stone that stands outside Tempelhof Airport. That memorial reminds Berliners of something which they call the Air Bridge, and we remember as the Air Lift — a bridge that brought in from the outside world not only supplies of food and drink but fresh hope and courage, too.
So it would be easy to sit at one of those pleasant cafe tables in the new neon-and-stucco Kurfurstendamm and start working out how long it will be before Berlin is right back on its feet again.
But Berliners don’t look at it like that. Men like Alfred Friedel, who can still joke with a price on his head, are realists, too.
They know that they have only begun to skim the surface of the problem. They know that the Kurfurstendamm, with its brand-new hotels and super-stores, is only a glittering facade. Every day of their lives they pass great mountains of rubble and burnt-out shells that will still be there long after many of them are dead.
And they know, too, that while an implacable enemy is sitting on the other side of the street nothing they can do has much real point or significance.
And there is a fear that bites into every father’s heart in West Berlin. Alfred Friedel, as a journalist, knows better than most that growing up in that other Berlin is a young generation, two out of every three of whom are already pro-Communist.
They learn fast, these young Germans. And he remembers Hitler’s boast: “Give me a boy until he is 12 and he will be my man for life.” A child born in East Berlin in the month that Hitler died will be eight years old now…
So far there has been little Communist infiltration among the youth of West Berlin. But Alfred Friedel and thousands of other Berlin fathers wonder how long it will be before the poison has run right through the system…
But in the meantime Berliners — and I’m thinking especially of those in West Berlin — hang on to that precious thing called Hope, which was born again for them five years ago when they found that those who had so lately been their bitter enemies could also be their firm friends.
In Berlin today they are reading an English proverb backwards: “Where there’s Hope there’s Life.”
Reproduced with permission
© 2024 Newspapers.com
Note: More details of the Berlin Air Lift may be found here.
Jerry F 2024
