Crack in the Wall

The Berlin Wall, which has served so often as a backdrop for human suffering, last week witnessed a very different sort of scene. From the divided city's Western sector, they came on foot by the thousands--old people struggling with sacks full of presents, small children carrying freshly cut roses or tulips, young mothers pushing prams, men lugging thick suitcases. Alternately smiling and weeping for joy, the visitors trudged past the tank traps, the death strip, the watchtowers. Finally, after clearing the last checkpoint, they rushed to meet friends and relatives whose faces some of them had almost forgotten. "Meine Liebe!" cried one old lady as she embraced an East Berlin friend. "What a beautiful day!"

For Berliners, West and East alike, it was indeed a beautiful day. For the first time in six years, the Wall--the concrete monstrosity that divides the city --was opened for visitors from West Berlin. The East German regime of Party Boss Erich Honecker had granted three-day Easter passes to West Berliners as an illustration of the freer access that will be allowed after the Big Four agreement on the city is put into action. Although it was a one-way deal --no East Berliners were allowed to visit the Western sector--West Berlin's Mayor Klaus Schiitz praised the Communist gesture. "What was written on paper now is being put into practice," he declared as about 500,000 West Berliners began to stream through the Wall. "This shows that an easing of tensions is possible, and not only in theory."

The West Berliners stepped into a city that in many ways was as strange to them as Warsaw or Moscow might be. The new showcase sections of East Berlin, with their large lifeless squares and sterile Marxist-modern, glass-sheathed buildings, impressed many of the visitors as utterly foreign. Visiting food shops and department stores, West Berliners were struck by the high prices (coffee $10 per lb., a cotton dress $38, a small refrigerator $496). Some West Berliners clearly felt a sense of unease in being surrounded by the battalions of gray-uniformed Vopos (People's Police) and green-suited cops. Actually, the East German guards, normally a surly lot, were friendly and accommodating. Even on Good Friday, when the influx was at its height, there were only short delays at the border points. For the first time in 20 years, the East Germans also allowed West Berliners to travel beyond city limits into East Germany, but those who did so were subjected to thorough checks.

Meanwhile, on the autobahns linking West Berlin with West Germany --frequently the scene of long delays and harassment--the East Germans temporarily put into effect new access arrangements that had been worked out as part of the Berlin agreement. Border formalities were reduced from an average 30 minutes to only five or ten. No one was required to get out of autos or to submit to a search. As a test of the new East German attitude, one driver openly displayed copies of a West German military magazine and a Hamburg sex tabloid on the front seat of his car. In the past, Western publications were confiscated lest they contaminate East German minds. This time, however, an East German guard simply shrugged.

The Communists' Easter concessions were timed to place maximum pressure on West Germany to confirm the treaties of Warsaw and Moscow, which will be submitted to the Bundestag in early May. Unless Bonn ratifies the treaties, the Berlin agreement, and its clauses about freer access, will not go into effect. Hence, the East Germans and their Soviet supporters in effect were saying: "See, this is how it is going to be if the treaties are ratified. If they aren't, forget it." The Communists have hinted that the situation will get worse if Bonn fails to follow through on its promise to improve relations with its East bloc neighbors.

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