The Border of Freedom

One sunny March day, during the revolutions of 1848, Germans were happy because King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia had just promised them a parliament. Two royal dragoons accidentally fired their muskets into a jubilant Berlin crowd. In the brief fighting that followed, 255 Berliners were killed. The next day, their bodies were placed before the royal palace, and the King and Queen appeared on their balcony to view them (see cut). The crowd shouted: "Take off your hat!" Frightened, the King obeyed. The crowd shouted: "Come down!" Again the King obeyed, and walked respectfully among the biers.

Last week, facing autocrats less easily frightened than a Prussian king, Berlin attempted to commemorate the occasion. What happened was typical of the state of Germany today.

The Race to the Dead. The Berlin city authorities had urged all political parties to take part in ceremonies commemorating the "March Dead." But the Communist-run Socialist Unity Party (S.E.D.) balked. It wanted its own ceremony. The authorities went ahead, ordered a granite monument. It was to be unveiled at 8 a.m., so that the S.E.D. would not be able to get to the cemetery first.

But Communists are early risers. At 7:45, the S.E.D. vanguard arrived, panting. They placed wreaths before the still veiled monument to the memory of the men who had believed in a freedom which Communists have always denounced as "bourgeois liberalism," and which today they are seeking to destroy.

Later, some 70,000 non-Communists stood before the old German Reichstag, listening to Socialist Leader Franz Neumann. Pointing to Berlin's historic city gate, on the border between the U.S. and the Soviet sectors, he cried: "There stands the Brandenburger Tor. One hundred years ago it was the border of Berlin. Now it is the border where freedom ends."

A Cruel Spirit. The truth of his statement was illustrated when Berlin's City Assembly met to debate the quiet terror which has gripped Berlin's Soviet sector for months. Anti-Communists have been disappearing daily, without a trace. Related Frau Annedore Leber, a Socialist deputy: "Today again I had a strange visitor who wanted to know about my political life and what sort of guests come to my house. That is why I am as much concerned about the fate of Maniu, Petkoff and Masaryk as I am about the fate of my closest friends. . . . There is a cruel spirit ready to act in Berlin tomorrow, the way it acted in Prague today!"

Over Communist protests, a resolution was adopted, asking for establishment, throughout all Berlin, of habeas corpus, now existent only in the U.S. sector. It would be submitted to Berlin's four-power administration, and would have no effect whatsoever.

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