Berlin: Celebrations for Some

All along the Berlin Wall, Christmas music was playing. Communist border guards on their best behavior helped old women and toddling children onto Eastbound streetcars, and down the empty, echoing length of Karl Marx Alice even the weathered posters of Walter Ulbricht seemed to be smiling. Then, just before dark on Christmas Day, two 18-year-old East Germans made a break for the Wall. As the boys scrambled over the barbed wire, searchlights blazed and flares burst. A pizzicato of burp guns played brief counterpoint to Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. Lungs shredded by Vopo bullets, Electrician’s Apprentice

Paul Schultz became the first would-be Wall buster to die on a Christmas Day.

And a Bit Forlorn. Murder at the Wall was inevitable during the Christmas interlude, for the arrangement by which Berlin’s Communists had permitted 700,000 West Berliners into East Berlin during the holidays could only have its fatal temptations for Easterners who wished to reciprocate. In a sense, it was curious that more East Berliners did not try to break out. To hear the West Berliners tell it last week, the contrast they found with their living standards in West Berlin was appalling. Nowhere did the disparity between East and West come clearer than at the crossing points themselves. West Berliners cruised through the Wall in gleaming Volkswagens and Mercedeses or walked across warmly clad in fur coats, bright Bogner ski pants and ruddy complexions. The East Berliners who greeted them looked grey and chunky by contrast in their long, drab overcoats and Russian-style galoshes. Their streets, their homes looked much the same: empty, and a bit forlorn.

Once through the Wall, Westerners were struck by the hollow silence of the Eastern sector. There was none of the bustle and traffic noise of the West, and even conversations among neighbors had a leaden, monotonous quality, with the nuances coming from the eyes. The only color was in the shops, stocked especially for the holiday season with eggs, wurst of all kinds, toys, cosmetics, porcelain and even—wonder of wonders—oranges. The Vopos seemed to be the major consumers of these tropical delicacies, and every snowy crossing point reeked with the tang of orange peel. But everyone knew that by mid-January the East Berlin grocery shops would be back to their drab staples: potatoes, cabbages and weary lentils.

Danger for Some. Most of the Western visitors wasted little time talking politics with their relatives. With more than two years of separation behind them, they dwelt on family matters, cooed over Tante Emma’s new baby, or drank a belated brandy to Opa’s memory. Only after the initial thrill of renewal ties was there time for furtive whispers about the future. Could the Communists really close the Wall again Jan. 5—the deadline—now that both East and West Berliners had tasted a mo ment of freedom? It was bound to erode Communism’s barrier, and to speed the day when, sooner or later, the ugly Wall would have to come down.

These were heavy thoughts, sad thoughts to people who had learned long ago to build hope on frail foundations. There were little groups of East Berliners who stood at the gaps in the Wall, watching the Western influx although they expected no visitors. Near the Friedrichstrasse Station, one old woman shook hands with every willing Westerner. “My son fled after it had become a crime to flee,” she explained. “So he can’t come. Still, it’s good to see you.” Whispered a grizzled World War I veteran: “Who in a prison isn’t pleased when there are visitors?”