The Wall Triumphant

It was still pitch dark when the Soviet T-345 tanks clattered up to Brandenburg Gate and East German soldiers began unloading the first concrete blocks and the barbed wire. As the day dawned, crowds of Berliners gathered to watch what was happening: the building of a giant wall through the heart of their city. Last week, on the 15th anniversary of that gray morning, thousands of East German Communists paraded near the 25-mile barricade to celebrate it as a protection against "Western revanchists and provocateurs." On the Western side, the Christian Democrats countered with a solemn torchlight march to the former Reichstag (parliament) building.

However reviled in the West, the Berlin Wall has achieved its grim purposes. The flow of refugees through West Berlin has been reduced from a pre-Wall high of as many as 20,000 people in one day to a mere trickle of 900 in 1975. By sealing off the exodus of professional and skilled labor, the Wall has helped turn East Germany into the world's most prosperous Communist nation.

East Germany's rise to international respectability has embittered and demoralized the West Berliners who remain stranded 110 miles from the nearest Western border, and who are exposed daily to Communist pressures that sporadically explode into major incidents. Although kept alive by massive infusions of money from Bonn, West Berlin is languishing. Once a vibrant citadel, it has acquired a glum and shabby look. Even the famous Kurfurstendamm has only about six blocks of tourist-attracting brightness, and the rest looks run down and dreary.

Death Zone. Since the Wall was built, 70 people have been trapped and killed among the wires, land mines and machine-gun towers that form a 100-yd. "death zone" along the border. At least 100 more people have been killed trying to cross the East German frontier at other points, and there seems to be no lessening of the vigilance.

Last month a vacationer from Hamburg strayed too near the border fence along its northern stretch, so the East German guards shot him and dragged him through the fence for interrogation. Several days later, a young Hamburg musician tried to engage an East German border guard in a chat about Western music. The response: a fusillade that sent the musician scrambling to safety in some nearby bushes. In the most recent incident, an Italian truck driver, who happened to be a member of the Communist Party, crossed legally into West Germany at a checkpoint in Bavaria, but then he was called back by the Eastern border guards. As he walked toward the checkpoint, the guards inexplicably opened fire and killed him.

All along the Wall, East German authorities are renovating the barrier. Grimy, brown sections are being replaced with prefabricated, whitewashed concrete slabs. The old sections were 10 ft. high; the new ones rise to 12 ft. Finding the new whitewashed wall even more offensive than the original, West Berliners risk the wrath of trigger-happy guards to smear angry slogans on it. "It is there, and we have to live with the damn thing," said one elderly man. "But we hate it!"

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