Berlin: Where’s the Crisis?

At Checkpoint Charlie in divided Berlin, where U.S. and Soviet tanks once faced off at point-blank range, Communist border guards last week erected Christmas trees. It was as paradoxical a symbol as any to mark the fourth anniversary of Nikita Khrushchev’s bold threat to force the West out of the city and sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany.

Even in Moscow there was not a hint of those old familiar ultimatums. A Khrushchev message to East German Communist Boss Walter Ulbricht pointedly omitted any reference to a separate peace treaty; Izvestia’s chief spokesman on Germany, Commentator Nikolai Polyanov, asked “What’s next?” in a foreign affairs article, but the question was aimed at other cold war issues. Not once since President Kennedy’s firm stand in Cuba, in fact, have the Communists tried their tough stuff at the most critical East-West boundary of them all. For the West it was a lesson to keep in mind.