Hands, Brains & Moods

It was characteristic of Berlin that while the rest of the world fretted about its continued existence, West Berliners were agitated by an old-fashioned election campaign. "I have come here to experience the coolness and confidence of Berliners," said Konrad Adenauer, and the old Chancellor's adroit compliment expressed a fact.

To an appreciative audience, Berlin's hottest political phenomenon, 45-year-old Socialist Mayor Willy Brandt, began a speech: "Everybody seems to be excited. And if the outside world is more excited than we are, perhaps we should at least be sympathetic."

Out There. The famed Berlin spirit long ago reckoned all its dangers, and decided not to dismiss them, but it also decided not to be oppressed by them. Says an officer of the Chamber of Trade and Industry, "We live by our hands and by our brains--and by other peoples' moods." Down inside, no West Berliner living in 186 sq. mi. of freedom no miles inside the Iron Curtain, can be indifferent to other people's moods, particularly "out there," as West Berliners call West Germany. In Bonn last week, before setting out for Berlin, Adenauer had summoned Socialist Opposition leaders for a rare visit to his Chancellery. All joined in spurning Khrushchev's talk of a "Free Berlin." But then Socialist Leader Erich Ollenhauer spoke up.

Had the time not arrived to reach for a larger settlement with the Russians about Germany's future status? "Ja, fine," said the old man, "we can discuss reunification at the same time." Adenauer had not changed: with him it was still reunification ueber alles. Next day Adenauer admonished the "flexibles" among his own party's Bundestag Deputies to stand "absolutely firm" with the West against wider negotiations over Berlin.

"I want to warn you," he added, "that any discussion of a peace treaty means discussing the Eastern frontier question," i.e., risking endorsement of the present Oder-Neisse border with Poland and thus abandoning Germany's "lost territories" to the East. It was the Chancellor's clinching argument, and a specifically German one, which had less appeal outside (the London Economist commented icily that the West "will still fight for Berlin but it will not fight for Breslau").

Money Stays. The Berlin that both Adenauer and his Opposition want to defend is not resting on the six months' stay of political execution that Khrushchev so grandly conceded. Hardly 1% of its bank deposits have fled to safer havens in the West since the crisis began; only a few factory orders have been canceled. Buildings still mushroom, factories still hum, refugees still pour in, as many as 2,000 a week, from Communist Germany.

A city 85% destroyed in World War II, West Berlin (pop. 2,200,000) now produces 25% more industrial goods than it did in 1936 and exports ten times as much as it did in 1950. All the world buys its machinery and its Siemens heavy electrical gear (generators for Mexico, transformers for South America). West German women wear Berlin's smartly tailored fashions. Three fancy new hotels have just opened, including the Berlin Hilton, featuring New York-style high prices and bellhops who hop to orders received by pocket radio. The only reason that West

Berlin does not pay its own way (its exports were 82% of its imports in 1957) is that half the capital's income formerly came through banking, insurance and commercial headquarters now shifted to Frankfurt, Duesseldorf and Hamburg. Booming Berlin still needs a $360 million-a-year assist from "out there."

Flying to Berlin from "out there" at midweek, Chancellor Adenauer pledged still more budget aid and factory orders from the West. "If we do not become frightened," he told Socialist Mayor Willy Brandt and other rain-soaked welcomers at Tempelhof Airport, "we and our Western allies will master the situation." And then these two men, in accord on the big issues, went their separate politicking ways. Adenauer was careful to criticize West German Socialists like Ollenhauer, but not Socialist Brandt. And Brandt did not bother to campaign against his Christian Democratic opponent, Ernst Lemmer, a member of Adenauer's Cabinet.

Instead Willy Brandt was speaking, to the point of hoarseness, to make sure that the Communists got less than their 2.7% of the last vote. The Communist Party is outlawed in the Federal Republic but free to run in quadripartite Berlin. The despised Communists campaigned with the slogan "A vote for the Communists is a vote for normalization" and "Vote against the occupation parties." At a claque-packed rally in West Berlin, white-maned Hermann Matern of the East German Politburo proclaimed that Western commercial planes have no right to fly over East Germany to West Berlin without his government's sovereign permission. "This situation must be brought in order," he blustered. Mayor Brandt sent his cops to protect the Communist rallies from irate West Berliners.

Evening after evening Willy Brandt motored from school to factory to beerhall, and addressed what Berliners call "felt-slipper" neighborhood meetings. Masterfully evoking the atmosphere of war's end and blockade, "when we hardly dared hope," the mayor got approving nods from women as he recalled how "mothers cheated themselves to give their husbands and children more to eat," ticked off post-blockade progress ("half a million new jobs, half a million Berliners in new apartments"), and briskly bade cloth-capped workers to stick with Berlin's friends in the West.

This week free Berlin cast its vote: for Mayor Brandt's Socialists, 52%; together with Adenauer's CDU, his coalition polled 89%. But, best news of all, the Communists got a measly 1.9%, even less than their vote before Nikita Khrushchev put Berlin once again to the test.

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