East and West
By SARAH "Li ow Mr. Betjeman would dislike it . . . the plannedness, the newness, the sharp lines of steel and glass, the laid-out gardens and the impli- cation of living together in clumps, the lack of Privacy. When I first saw it, it was a moon-land- scape of craters, even the torn stumps of the trees had been cut off for fuel, even the saplings had been dragged away to cook frost-bitten potatoes. Now it is more like space fiction . . . houses for the Beings from Outer Space.
Looking at the tall, aseptically neat blocks a sharply rejected question recurs : what would they do 'if anything happened'? No old-fashioned stoves to be stoked reluctantly with briquettes, no kitchen range to boil potatoes with sticks gathered in the Tiergarten, ten flights of dizzying stairs if the electric lifts fail. That's just the point about Berlin. They have consciously and knowingly decided to take their risks and like it. The warmly dressed Children with school satchels on their backs live in a world of electricity, where the post comes every morning and water runs unfailingly out of taps, both hot and cold. But their young parents remember a world of shattering noise that ground to a smoking, silent stop when no water ran, no telephone rang, no light gleamed at night in the heaped ruins; a world bounded by cellar walls stinking of death.
Partly it is the refugees, a slow loss of blood from the East, who make the East German govern- ment so eager to get their hands on West Berlin. West Berliners all know that. But I have never heard them say a word against the policy of accepting the fugitives. In the fat Western terri- tories one does occasionally hear grumbles over the burden—the Berliners know only too well what drives them.
Berlin people are quite different from any ,other kind of Germans. The last thirteen years have started a distillation of character; already the flavour is strong. It is not the flavour of 'German- ness' but of something new that has as yet no name. They are a community. Perhaps real com- munities must be small and threatened? Perhaps the city-state is the only possible unit for free men? You do not have to tell a Berliner that the Price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Surrounded though they are by a hostile territory and a huge army, they have the quality of liberty in them- selves. They accept their world with a good humour which has no sentimentality or postur- ing in it; it is so real they can laugh and listeft and argue with the preposterous kids sent over to plug the SED line for the Senate elections. A few older people leave the group with set faces, the younger ones laugh so loudly all together that they can be heard across the other side of the Kurftirsten- damm. No one raises a hang manger. ,
The Communist posters ask if Berliners want 'normalisation' in their city. If so, vote SED. On the other side of the city we see the normalisation. Of course, East Berlin has imbroVed enormously too in the last few years. Apart from the wideness of the streets and the physical bigness of the build- ings in the government section it could now be Wigan or Cardiff in the slump.
I cross a temporary bridge of wooden planks soaked with the November drizzle and enter the State Museum to see the Greek treasures recently returned from Russia. The treasures collected by the German archaeologists are wonderfully beauti- ful and well arranged. The elderly, shabby attendants drowse. The monumental fragments of. the Zeus Altar at Pergamon loom over a gaggle of young people led by a most competent lec- turer, a young woman, almost a girl, who explains everything in a clear precise voice. The young people remain in their groups, they do not look until what they are to look at has been explained. They are quiet, well-behaved, careful (on the other side of the city the young people are un- disciplined and noisy).
Later that day we take tickets for the Ber- liner Ensemble. The production (of The Caucasian Chalk Circle) is excellent. All the respectful, loving care that the Viennese expend on The Magic Flute is here lavished on the work of Brecht. Here is the echo of the Twenties, and of its experiments—with all their vagueness of thought, slowness and sloppy language. The propaganda is primitive; the points, drawing-pins driven in by a sledgehammer. The pace is maddeningly slow; the language almost farcically threadbare. No writer who could use the German language would write like this from choice, it must be lack of talent. I wonder how many of the critics who went mad over it in London knew German?
Exhausted with the boredom of the last act, we drive back to the West from one world to the other. One only has to do that to see why Ulbricht would love to get his hands on West Berlin. How he must long to punish the West Berliners for daring to defy his grey world, how he must hate them. . . . The glass towers seem like a battle- cry, a yell of defiance. Perhaps Mr. Betjeman would like it, after all, because in Berlin it is right.
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