West Berlin: Problems for a Protege

The Wall has long since pulled down the shutters on West Berlin’s “show window to the East,” robbing the city of its old excitement and sense of purpose. To make matters worse, the West German recession has caused a severe Berlin business slump. On top of all that, Mayor Willy Brandt went to Bonn last December and turned his job over to Heinrich Albertz, a hapless preacher-turned-politician who was unable to rule his own party, let alone the largest (pop. 2,191,000) city in Germany.

Mayor Albertz had been in office only six months when he began to lose his grip. His trouble started with the Shah of Iran’s visit in June, when West Berlin police fired on student demonstrators, killing one of them. Albertz backed up his police, but later had to back down when the city’s parliament decided that the police had, in fact, used too much muscle. After that, internal party squabbles forced Albertz to resign. Last week, by a vote of 81 to 38, the West Berlin parliament gave the problem-packed mayoral post to energetic Klaus Schütz, 41.

High Price. A Berliner, Schütz studied politics at Harvard in the late ’40s, returned to the U.S. in 1960 to observe the Kennedy-Nixon contest. He helped campaign for Willy Brandt in Brandt’s unsuccessful attempt to unseat Konrad Adenauer in 1961. Brandt, who liked Schütz’s work, sent him to Bonn as the city’s special representative to the federal government. When Brandt became Foreign Minister last year, he brought Schütz along as his No. 2 man.

Though he was not anxious to lose his protégé, Brandt could hardly object to Schütz’s return to Berlin. Schütz quickly made it clear that he, has little faith in Albertz’s plan to rebuild West Berlin prosperity by turning the city into a center for trade and cultural exchange between East and West. Not that he is against “building bridges,” said Schütz, but he is unwilling to pay the price the Communists demand for their cooperation. The East Germans want West Berlin turned into a “Free City” without ties to West Germany and without the protection of an Allied military presence. “West Berlin must not go off half-cocked,” said its new boss. “Berlin’s economy and jobs are guaranteed only by our tie to the West.”

Schütz also hopes to cool off the students at the Free University, which has become a haven for draft dodgers (West Berlin residents are exempt from West Germany’s 18-month conscription) and police-baiting left-wingers who want peace with East Germany at any price. “Rowdies once and for all will be put in their place,” he says. The students are likely to resent his toughness, but they can hardly challenge his credentials. He was, after all, one of the students who founded the Free University in 1948 as a protest against Communist domination of the old Berlin University in the city’s East Sector.