GERMANY: Herr Berlin

The last time West Berliners saw their lord mayor in public was at the end of an evening of Wagner in their Municipal Opera House. The last chord of the Gotterdämmerung had ebbed, the lights were up, the audience rose to go. Burly, hunched Ernst Reuter still sat in his center loge, his eyes bright, abstractedly beating time with nicotine-stained forefinger to some passage of the music that had died. Two days later Ernst Reuter, rumpled, undaunted hero of the cold war, died at his modest home of a heart attack.

Without him, West Berlin would not be the same.

Commissar. Ernst Reuter was the symbol of his city’s will to be free, and of his nation’s will to unite. He stood where worlds collide, and was not dwarfed; he gazed down the cannon’s throat and refused to be afraid. West Berlin is still a far-flung outpost, tempest-lashed in a Red sea. Cold war is its way of life and the Iron Curtain its backyard fence, yet in five years as mayor, Reuter refused to accept his city as an island. “Call it a spearhead,” he said with a faint grin, and by his courage he made it one.

Reuter was a Prussian who became a pacifist. He was a Socialist who knew what Communism was about, because he had once been a Communist. Fighting on the Russian front in World War I, he was wounded and captured by the Czar’s army. They set him to work in the coal mines, south of Moscow. The Red Revolution freed him, and Nikolai Lenin himself made Reuter a commissar in the new U.S.S.R. His boss in the Commissariat of Nationalities was Joseph Stalin, whom he afterwards dismissed as a man with “the mind of a sergeant.”

Reuter went back to Berlin in 1918. A letter from Lenin recommended him as “a man with a brilliant and lucid mind—but a little too independent.” Reuter soon broke with the Reds and returned to Socialism. Pravda called him a warmonger.

Elected to the Reichstag years later, he spoke out against Hitler and was twice put into concentration camp by the Nazis. When he got out he took refuge in London (where he learned his fluent and colorful English), then skipped to Turkey, where he mastered the language and lectured on city government. At the end of World War II, Ernst Reuter was eking out a living in Ankara. He rushed home to Berlin.

Man of Hope. “The city lay in ruins,” he wrote afterwards. “Barren, rigid as an icy waste, dead. A horrible hopelessness seemed to pervade the atmosphere.” Reuter’s first historic achievement was to give Berlin hope.

Reuter’s long-memoried Socialists elected him mayor. His slouching figure, encased in flapping, light raincoat and surmounted by a cheeky black beret, soon became a familiar sight in West Berlin. Poking in the ruins with his thick, brown cane, strolling through the Tiergarten, where he would sometimes help the Haus-frauen gather sticks for their fires, Ernst Reuter became a man whom the people loved. They called him Herr Berlin.

Reuter led Berlin out of the valley of death. The airlift that saved it was his finest hour. While the admiring world watched, the first moments of greatness touched the mayor of Berlin, raising him into the company of those who catch and express the spirit of their time. As Churchill’s voice had rung from Britain in the dark days of 1940, so the voice of Ernst Reuter rang out from blockaded Berlin, defying the enemy, rousing the free. “Nothing is going to be conquered here—” he thundered. “This city cannot be conquered— We will defend this old Berlin with our bodies . . .”

Ivan, Scram. Impatient with what he called “the old, fearful, pussyfooting non-combatants garbed in the robes of diplomatic wisdom,” Reuter jeered at the Russians and at the people who would bend before them. “What are the Soviets after?” he asked sarcastically. “What is the significance of the third sentence in the second paragraph of some editorial in a propaganda sheet steered from Moscow? This wholly unimaginative, enfeebled attitude of people who stare like rabbits at a snake, and wait to be devoured—this just fills the Soviets with contempt.”

Long before it was fashionable, the Socialist mayor of Berlin was urging the West to get tough with the Communists. “They will become unbelievably agreeable when the West begins to act,” he said. Reuter’s idea of action was to rearm Germany within a European framework, then launch a “political offensive to get the Soviets peacefully out of Europe.” “Why should only the Soviets say, “Yank, go home!’ ” he demanded. “Why don’t we all start saying ‘Ivan, scram!'”

Candles Behind the Curtain. When the Reds once threatened a May Day rally in West Berlin, Reuter called out half a million anti-Communist workers, and the Reds shied off. When the June 17 riots exploded in East Berlin, he optimistically hailed them as “the beginning of the end of the East Berlin regime.”

Distributing U.S. food packets to hungry East Germans was Reuter’s happiest chore. “I am glad,” he told his people, “that for once we can do something except just talk.”

Last week in Berlin there were candles for Ernst Reuter on both sides of the Brandenburger Tor. His body lay on a catafalque in front of his beloved Rat-haus. The coffin was draped in the Berlin flag and surmounted by his black beret. All one day and all that night, tens of thousands of Berliners filed past. Among them were many East Berliners, clutching their free food parcels. “He was our Reuter too,” said one East zone woman. Her husband could only mutter: “What will we do now?”