It Is Still There

Two years have passed since Berlin was severed by the Wall. On its anniversary last week, most West Berliners heeded official appeals to refrain from violent, futile demonstrations. Instead, they observed the day quietly by placing wreaths on the dozens of crosses marking each spot where a fleeing East German had been shot to death by Com munist guards. Only late in the evening was the city's grave calm broken by a mob of some 2,000 hell-raising West Berliners who surged into the area around Checkpoint Charlie, hurling rocks and insults across the Wall into the Soviet sector.

If Germans have learned to live with the Berlin Wall and the deadly, 830-mile barricade that divides the rest of their nation, on neither side have they forgotten or forgiven its existence. The most eloquent evidence of East Germans' refusal to accept Sovietization is that 16,456 of them have risked their lives and fled to the West since the Wall went up. Among them were 1,304 members of East Germany's army and police force, enough to form 13 companies. At least 65 more East Germans are known to have been killed while attempting to escape.

Facts of Life. Despite this somber chronicle of flight and death, many politicians and pundits outside Germany still cling to the notion -- based in part on deep-rooted fear of resurgent German power -- that its people are gradually becoming reconciled to their coun try's partition. In West Germany itself, this view is accepted in some quarters, mostly because it is a fact of present European life that the Russians cannot be moved out of East Germany, except by war, a West German surrender to Communism, or some kind of settlement for which West Germany might have to pay a ruinous price. As a result, many Germans are beginning to ponder measures that fall, short of actual reunification--such as trade pressure--designed to persuade Communist Boss Walter Ulbricht to give East Germans a little more freedom and a somewhat better life.

Franz Thedieck, State Secretary for All-German Affairs, said recently: "Of course we would like to see Germany reunited, but if there were conditions of freedom in East Germany the existence of one single German state would not be absolutely necessary." Existential Philosopher Karl Jaspers created a furor by suggesting in 1960 that his countrymen must accept changes in the map of Germany as part of their liability for Hitler. Many Germans now accept his thought: "The only thing that counts is freedom. Compared with that, reunification is a matter of indifference."

But the thought is largely academic, since it would be almost as difficult to liberalize the Ulbricht regime as to get the Russians out of East Germany. The Jaspers line thus may temper but does not eliminate the basic urge for reunification in a country which achieved national unity later than other European nations and is fiercely insistent on its ethnic identity. That fact is at the heart of Bonn's opposition to any East-West agreement that would formally or psychologically seal the status quo in Germany and Europe. Says a Western ambassador in Bonn: "The issue of German unity still has more explosive potential than any other issue on the political scene in Germany today. We'd be fools to underestimate it."

Shift to Right. Far from symbolically and physically sealing Germany's division, the Wall has become a constant, inescapable reminder to West Germany's 57 million citizens that 17 million of their compatriots live in privation and terror. Older Germans, including distinguished Sociologist Helmut Schelsky, have warned repeatedly that a complacent younger generation will in time come to regard their compatriots "over there" as foreigners. However, German students on the whole seem to agree with Christa Roll, a 23-year-old Munich student, who argues that idealistic youngsters have been deeply affected by the Wall. Since it went up, she says, "the intellectual center of gravity has shifted to the right. Before that, a lot of liberals would still put in a good word for East Germany now and then. But the Wall changed them, for it was exactly the kind of ugly suppression that every progressive is supposedly fighting against."

Most Germans--even those who acknowledge that reunification cannot become reality in the foreseeable future--agree that it is a moral imperative. Recent opinion polls show that 54% of West Germany's citizens consider their country's division "an unbearable situation." Another survey, taken last year, indicated that 40% consider reunification the nation's most urgent problem; only 17% gave first priority to the preservation of peace. Evidence of their continuing concern for their kin is the rise in West Germans' shipments of food and clothing to Communist Germany: from 35 million in 1950, the number of packages crossing the border has risen to more than 52 million a year. A whole new literature in West Germany concerns itself with the alienation of East and West, "the dreaded dreadful strangeness," as Uwe Johnson wrote in Speculations About Jakob, in which friends and relatives divided by the border gradually cease to be individuals in each other's eyes, instead become political symbols.

Emotionally, at least, a united nation remains the aspiration of a vast majority of West Germans. The U.S. would only pave the way for a new and dangerous wave of German nationalism by ignoring it.

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