No Road Back?

More & more Europeans have become convinced that the road back for their continent lies through Germany. The Germans themselves are not looking that far ahead. They are bitter, cynical, well-nigh hopeless. Berlin Correspondent Percy Knauth last week cabled glimpses of the German scene:

Potato Seekers. On the Autobahn at the edge of Berlin, a young girl in a bright print dress lies on the grass in the warm sun. A man, whose dirt-streaked face is stubbled with beard, squats on a knapsack near her, staring out before him. A youth on crutches hobbles out on the broad concrete highway and hails a truck which has just left the checkpoint. As it stops, all scramble to their feet and crowd around the driver. They are the potato seekers, hitchhiking their way out to the flat farm country, where they will try to trade their few belongings for food.

Before the driver lets them climb aboard, he demands at least one cigaret from each of them. "What the hell," he says, "I've got to live, too, don't I?" Truck drivers prosper that way.

As evening falls, the potato seekers drift back to the Autobahn. Some have full knapsacks; others are emptyhanded. A father and three daughters wave down a passing American car. They are filthy. For two days they have tramped across plowed fields, barefooted, to save their shoes. They have had one meal of bread and water since they left Berlin. "We got nothing," said the eldest daughter. "The peasants told us we had nothing they wanted in trade." The youngest girl, twelve years old, falls immediately into a deep sleep, clutching a six-week-old puppy which they got because a farmer wanted to drown it.

Party-Liners. In a three-room flat in Hoechst, outside Frankfurt, sits Peter Fischer, a tubby, earnest little man who spent a lifetime in the parties of the working class--first the Social Democrats, then the Communists. He helped form the Frankfurt city government when the Nazis fled.

"I never rejoined a political party after the war," he explains, "because I do not believe that this is a time for party lines. For two years, when I wasn't fighting the parties in the pursuit of their party interests, I was trying to get them to work together. Well, the Social Democrats won the election, and I, whom every man on the street here knows by sight, I lost my position as a city councilor. I have given up politics now until the Germans realize that only by working together can they rebuild this country. It is our greatest tragedy that we have not brought forth a single able man in politics."

Lovers. In the snack bar of Frankfurt's Rhein-Main airport, a German girl sits with her G.I. fiance. He is a slight, blond boy of perhaps 18; she is a blonde, bulging, overbearing, with a broad, white face, narrow, calculating eyes and a smile like the flat glare of an electric light that turns on & off at the touch of a switch. She leans with both elbows on the table and in a loud and domineering voice orders ice cream from the tired German waitress, while the boy follows her movements with a young dog's eyes. Outside, in the lounge, is a group of German war brides who will take off in two hours for America. Among them is a mother with a baby in her arms. She sits and dreams with a slight half-smile on her lips, her eyes on the plane outside, one hand caressing the baby's downy hair.

Gardeners, Miners, Vintners. In the hot July sun, people tend the little vegetable gardens from which other people steal by night, and gardeners and thieves both act from the same motive--to store food against the awful winter ahead. In Bavaria, a famous movie actor who played leading roles in Nazi anti-Semitic films, is cleared by a denazification board, and before another Spruchkammer in the U.S. zone appears a former high official of the late Ribbentrop's Foreign Office, likewise to walk away a free man.

In the Russian zone, a man receives a notice to report at the railroad station within 48 hours; he knows he will be sent to work in the uranium mines near Chemnitz.* He packs a knapsack and is heard from no more.

In the U.S. zone, a young man who made a name as a writer under Naziism works in a rock quarry and wonders how he can ever bring up three growing boys. In the British zone, a Ruhr miner washes his coal-streaked body in the daylight after eight hours' work underground, then sets out for the countryside to trade some clothes for bread. In the French zone a winegrower watches police break into his garage. They haul out ten cases of wine which he had set aside to sell to an American for cigarets.

Out of millions of such little defeats, begotten by the great defeat, the mood of Germany today is compounded. The Germans gave the last ounce of their strength to follow men who proclaimed themselves their leaders. They find little strength within themselves now that these leaders are ignominiously dead & gone.

*To mine uranium-bearing pitchblende, the Russians are using tens of thousands of Germans, draftees (i.e., slaves) and volunteers. This week from Leipzig an A.P. correspondent reported on the primitive conditions under which the pitchblende miners work in the Erz Gebirge (ore mountains) of Saxony. They carry the pitchblende to the surface in crude buckets attached to winches. In one shaft workers must climb up & down a 500-ft. ladder. The whole area is under heavy guard. Once in the mine area, even volunteer miners may not leave. The pitchblende is flown direct from Saxony to the Soviet Union.

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