Berlin: Escalation of Emotions

Anti-American demonstrations may be acceptable elsewhere in the world, but they are practically sacriligious in West Berlin, whose citizens know they owe their freedom to American determination to keep them free. Thus last week, when 10,000 leftist students marched through the streets carrying Communist banners, chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” and crying their hatred of the “Amis,” the city’s reaction was immediate and visceral. Spurred by angry newspaper editorials, Mayor Klaus Schutz called West Berliners out for a giant pro-American demonstration that would serve as “an answer to the radicals and rowdies in our city.”

The answer was delivered in force. Into John F. Kennedy Platz on a chill grey afternoon swarmed 100,000 West Berliners—a crowd ten times larger than the students had been able to assemble. They brought homemade placards, shouted encouragement to the U.S. and set fire to Communist flags. Some incensed demonstrators even assaulted a score of hapless hippies. “We won’t let our free Berlin be trampled,” Schütz told the crowd. “We fight back.”

By taking his fight to the streets, the mayor may have stirred up nearly as much trouble as he cured. Both demonstrations inflamed the already volatile suspicions between the city’s populace and its minority student rebels—who, annoying though they may be, are not a real threat.

Alarmed by “the escalation of emotions,” a group of prominent Berlin churchmen published an open letter to their fellow citizens, urging everyone to cool down. Their pleas are being ignored. Schütz’s own Social Democratic Party is on the point of expelling its left wing, some of whose members took part in the student march. With widespread popular support, right-wing politicians of all parties have begun a campaign to ban the radical student organizations and expel their leaders from the city—an action that would only drive the leftists underground. Even more ominous, the extreme right wing took advantage of the tensions to organize something called the “Berlin Action Committee,” a kind of vigilante group that would “restore,” by its own direct means, the city’s “sense of security and civil courage.”