Berlin: Crisis of Confidence

West of the Wall, it looked like business and pleasure as usual. Warm weather piled up Europe’s shiniest traffic jams in Berlin streets. Sailboats shimmied on the Wannsee. Just outside rifle range of Ulbricht’s wasteland, Kurfürstendamm shop windows were mink-lined. But for all its air of defiant normalcy. West Berlin last week breathed suspicion and uncertainty. Dismayed at the Kennedy Administration’s hints of concessions over Berlin, its leaders warned gravely that the people’s nerves were wearing tissue-thin. Trumpeted Bild-Zeitung’s front page: is GERMANY NOW BEING SOLD OUT? Declared one high official: “Things that were not considered possible before are now becoming possible. This is leading to a crisis of confidence.”

In newspapers’ classified sections, property for sale in West Berlin outran buyers’ advertisements 8 to 1. Many advertisers played openly on apprehension. Asked one: “Who would like to move his business to Hanover?” Others emphasized the attractions of living in West Germany (“near the French border” was one lure), Vienna, even Majorca. Despite West Berlin’s lavish tax concessions to new industry, almost every Berlin-based company of note had put down a zweites Bein, or second leg, in safer territory.

Death Strip. What mostly worried West Berlin officials was a drastic population drain that could transform the city—now one of Europe’s leading cultural and industrial centers—into a ghost town. Forsaken by tourists and conventioneers, the Berlin Hilton already stands half empty. Since the week before the Wall went up, the number of citizens pulling out of West Berlin has quadrupled, from an average 75 daily to some 300. House-moving companies are booked for weeks, often months, in advance. To stay or not to stay has become the No. 1 topic at every Berlin dinner table. In 1958, when Khrushchev threatened a showdown in Berlin, it was considered cowardly to quit. Today most citizens agree with the businessman who insisted: “Any man who considers his family responsibilities is obliged to leave now.”

Already trade has suffered, notably near the border where West and East Germans made 500,000 individual crossings daily. East Germans alone bought from 10% to 20% of all retail goods sold in West Berlin, took advantage of special rates to purchase almost 10 million theater, cinema and concert tickets yearly. To keep them inside for good, the Communists last week methodically plugged loopholes in the Wall. Along the no man’s land Berliners call the Death Strip, some 3,000 men and women were deployed to clear the ground so that fugitives would find no cover from border sentries’ machine guns. Only the dead may cross without hindrance. In a macabre ritual at the Kreuzberg crossing point each Wednesday, two identical funeral processions approach from each side of the border. After each has handed over urns containing the ashes of Berliners whose survivors live on the other side of the Wall, the two funeral trains return to their sectors.

Up from the Sewer. Still the East Germans managed to wriggle, swim, crawl and leap to freedom. Two California college students who tried to smuggle out an East German girl were arrested and given two-year prison sentences after a trial that enabled the Communists to spout Ulbricht’s new theme song: Refugees are victims of the West’s “slave trade.” One day, four Vopos (Red cops) stood sheepishly by while a West German boldly cut through a barbed-wire barrier and let in 39 refugees—followed by all four Vopos. One escape attempt gave breathless bystanders a grim Berlin cliffhanger. From a window athwart the border, an elderly widow tried to jump into a waiting safety net but froze in terror. “Spring dock!” bawled the crowd below. “Jump!” Two youths swarmed up, grabbed at her feet and slipped into the net. In a second attempt they had just seized her legs when two burly Vopos appeared in the window and tried to wrestle her back. The tug of war went to West Berlin. One of the youths clinging to her feet simply let himself fall, dragging the woman with him. Both landed in the net.

But the Wall had done more than stanch East Germany’s exodus. In six weeks its shadow has lengthened over the whole city. There will be no panic in West Berlin, most observers believe, if the U.S. stands firm on the “essential” rights of access. Said one high official: “With these rights, this city can be held. Without them, you can stick a billion marks and a hundred divisions in here and you won’t save the city.”