Berlin on the Chessboard
From SARAH GAINHAM
BONN
THE West is in danger of letting Berlin slip out of its hands by default. Day-to-day decisions get left to the Germans, and the Ger- mans are still politically immature. They need a lead from their Allies and all they get is shrugged shoulders.
ex Peuce.s. The West Germans seem to have caught the American ailment of electioneering t:w° Years out of every four, and Berlin is becom- ing a Pawn in their election game—which is only a game, compared with the symbolic importance at Berlin. This is because the Mayor of West Willy Brandt, is now seen as the one serious danger to Chancellor Adcnauer and the Christian Democrats in the 1961 elections in West Germany. Not the Socialist Party; Brandt 40 win only a personal victory, in spite of his Party and not because of it. The important thing that the elections will be West German elec- tions and Berlin is not and cannot be part of est Germany. Germany lost Berlin in 1945, When Breslau and Koenigsberg were lost. And the greatest military and moral disaster in uroPean history since the sack of Rome fifteen hundred years ago will not be reversed by the ranting of the embittered survivors. Rut it is possible that concern with their votes ---tnthey amount to several million—will continue v-hcause mistakes like the two meetings of sur- . Take the case of the meetings in the city recently of ex-prisoners of war and Eastern ID "'ors last week. The fact that both these meet- ings were of Berlin groups, which ex-Berliners nd others from West Germany wanted to visit, 3 not the point—neither is the fact that similar meetings have taken place for years without fir,.°11sing East German Communist propaganda e• The point is that the Allied Commandants j' Gil Berlin ought to have known that the East 0 "ails were looking for trouble—which every- ne else knew. d, No the Allies have allowed a fresh and pciril,gerous precedent to be established, that the 40ilee of the East Zone (DDR) can and do refuse 04e55 to Berlin for their own reasons and with.: rsilt reference to Fgur-Power agreements. A tilurther result is that a meeting of the Federal 41440-lent in Berlin later this month is now rri doubt. The elected representatives of the Ger- 11, People have as much right to meet in West as the -'elected' representatives of the Zrinao People have to meet in the Volkskam- no4. in East Berlin; but this moral right may irrW go by the board because a few hundred' eeoneilables insisted on meeting in Berlin co'tead of Hanover or Munich, and the Allied LMIlandants weakly let them. th70 °Ile can demand that, the millionsitto lost Cr th-ei homes in Eastern Europe, the innocent with guilty, should forget those homes. But to vr,, o:'"er to their bitterness for the sake of their is to keep artificially alive the dangerous hou,. neurotic illusion that the homes are some- A' not lost but only in abeyance. politician who allows himself a lukewarm ter vitsive answer to the question of the lost "It • • °Iles In Germany loses votes for his party. And Berlin is part of the lost territories. If Berlin survives for the West it is as an Allied cause, and not a Cierman cause; the Germans lost the city fifteen years ago as surely as Rome was lost to Alaric. The logic is quite inescapable. The Mayor of West Berlin cannot be a West German politician. And the Allied Commandants should have higher status and more authority and they should use them.
There is, however, another side to the picture.
found two things very noticeable from the Autobahn to and from Berlin last week. The first was the truly pitiful condition of the agricul- tural country we drove through. Brandenburg is not good land and could never present a lush, cared-for picture of high-productivity farming. But in eleven years I have never seen it as weedy, scrubby, abandoned-looking as it is now. The harvest is bad everywhere this year; if the harvest looks like that, with small, blackened stooks falling to rot in the streaming rain, then the East Germans will be depending on Russian charity for this winter and spring.
The other noticeable thing was the concern of the East German police that travellers to the Leipzig Fair, which opened the same weekend as the two meetings in West Berlin that the Com- munists were making all the fuss about, should be as little inconvenienced as possible. Naturally they were inconvenienced; if the road is crammed with stopped traffic for miles before the frontier a foreign car going to Leipzig can no more force its way through the scrum than a German car going to Berlin: I had the impression that whoever planned the propaganda action against the political meetings had failed to check the date of the Leipzig Fair, and that everybody, was with reason worried about this mistake.
Trade from West Germany to East Germany, has more than quadrupled in the last five years, from (roughly translated) 100 million dollars in 1954 to 470 million dollars in 1959. Trade from East Germany to West has nearly trebled— from 75 million dollars to 220 million dollars. A large part of East German deliveries remain the same, soft coal for Berlin and such agricul- tural mass 'products for the city as potatoes; the increase from West to East is not only very much greater, it is largely high-quality industrial plo- ducts.
It seems unlikely that West Berlin will get many Brandenburg potatoes this year; and coal is much less important to Berlin than it was a few years ago. But East Germany needs the money for the coal, and as for the industrial imports from West Germany, they are enormously important to the Communists—their complicated planning of production is chaotic eribugh with them, and would be worse without.
West Germany's exports last year reached the pre-war figure for the whole of the Reich. East Germany's production is overstrained and every day trained workers make off to the capitalist West. There are moves the West could make in the chess battle with East Germany, quietly and without polemics.
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