Besieged City

The late afternoon crowds pushed and jostled past the well-stocked shops of the Kurfurstendamm, or loafed in its sidewalk cafes over mountainous sundaes and cool drinks. The Busch Circus, set up in tents nearby, advertised a "Swedish Tarzan" and eight ferocious tigers. Along Onkel Tom Strasse* in the U.S. sector, Berliners strolled through a fragrant snowfall of locust blossoms. Plump, healthy-looking children cavorted atop West Berlin's "Mountain of Tears," a huge pile of rubble.

"Do you notice any nervousness?" asked West Berlin Mayor Ernst Reuter proudly. If there was any last week among West Berlin's besieged 2,000,000 it was not apparent.

Harassments. With practiced eye, they measured the new Communist insults and harassments, and decided that the Russians did not intend war. There were incidents aplenty. Nightly there were isolated shootings and Communist kidnapings. An East German policeman slightly wounded an American MP at one border point. Dial telephone service between East and West sectors had been cut off by the Communists. As many as 800 refugees a day fled from East Germany to join West Berlin's 290,000 jobless.

The Communists suddenly confronted the U.S. and Britain with huge bills ($14 million for the U.S., $4,650,000 for the British) for telephone & telegraph service between West Berlin and West Germany, as they had during the 1948 Berlin blockade, and demanded daily instead of the routine monthly payments on all rail freight charges. West Berliners were delighted by a tit-for-tat British gesture: surrounding for seven days a Communist radio station in the British sector with barbed wire and a cordon of tam-o'-shan-tered Scottish troops, trapping inside 40 East Germans and 20 Russian soldiers.

Hanging On. The Russians still had not made the big plunge--a blockade of the railways, canals and Autobahn which are West Berlin's lifeline to the West. There was no noticeable hoarding of groceries (the city has three to six months' supply on hand), no flight of capital to West Germany, almost no talk of another airlift (although there are plans in U.S. files). In garden plots where they had grown potatoes last time, West Berliners were growing flowers.

"The danger for us lies not here," tough-minded Mayor Reuter told West Berliners last week, "but it lies in the fact that outside Berlin, opinion might gain ground that Berlin is endangered, and there no longer is any use supporting it."

* Part of the Onkel Tom quarter of Berlin, which got its name from a book which became as well known in Europe as in its native setting --Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

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