Time for Strong Nerves

Inching ahead with almost leisurely menace, Nikita Khrushchev built up pressure on the Allied position in West Berlin. But his real aim, it became clearer, was to force Western recognition of his servile East German satellite regime.

When Washington declared that it would defend West Berlin as if it were U.S. soil, Pravda jeered that "the creation of a war psychosis" could not keep the peace-loving Soviet Union from unselfishly handing over its control of the Allied traffic to West Berlin to its puppet government. A six-man Soviet-East German commission met in East Berlin to arrange take-over details. "Once again the eyes of the world are upon us," tough Socialist Mayor Willy Brandt (see box) told West Berlin's Parliament. "We have no weapons, but we have a right to live, and we have strong nerves."

Before Christmas Comes. That old slugging partner of Khrushchev's, West Germany's oak-hearted Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, was again being subjected to the crudest of taunts and the hardest of tests. He was under pressure from the so-called "flexibles" of his own party, who have been criticizing his refusal to permit any negotiation with the East German puppet regime. They say that Germany can never be reunified without talks. Adenauer sees clearly that such talks will not end in reunification, but in recognition of the "two Germanys." Grudgingly, the old man dispatched a reply to Moscow's latest note, conceding for the first time that the status of reunified Germany might be discussed before free, all-German elections are held.

Moscow at once sent beefy Ambassador Andrei Smirnov lumbering to tell him, almost mockingly, that West Germans ought to be pleased over the Soviet plan to get the British, French and U.S. occupation forces out of Berlin. According to drastically edited versions of the old man's outrage, he grimly and bitterly exchanged unpleasantries with his caller for an hour.

"I told him," rasped the Chancellor himself next evening at a state election rally in Munich, "that we look upon the forces of our Western allies at Berlin as defenders of freedom, and that it is of the greatest importance that they should remain there." But at an Indonesian embassy reception Smirnov told reporters: "We will give Berlin back to the Germans. I hope it will go quickly, the quicker the better. Everything will be settled by Christmas."

Some Adenauer supporters in Bonn urged the Western powers to drive tanks and armed convoys across the no miles to West Berlin rather than recognize any East German right of control. Even in the 1948 Berlin blockade days, when all Germany was occupied territory of the conquerors, the U.S. never tried that. Actually, since 1955, West German trucks, barges and boxcars have supplied half a million tons a month to West Berlin, plying back and forth under East German controls. Last week, though still not officially recognizing each other, East and West Germany signed three supplemental semiofficial trade agreements, insuring that whatever happens to Allied military convoys, civilian supplies will at least continue to roll into West Berlin.

Till Freedom Comes. While the U.S. and France stoutly stood their ground, the British began to make noises as if it did not matter much what compromises were made so long as the West stayed in West Berlin. The London Economist thought it odd that the West should be willing to talk about Germany with Russian Communists but not with German

Communists, and even odder that the West should insist on the Russian right to stay in Berlin. But in pressing for the kind of recognition--whether de facto or formal--that would only cement the division of Germany, the Russians are obviously seeking the status quo that Khrushchev told Walter Lippmann is the goal of Soviet diplomacy.-

The recognition Russia hopes to win for its East German puppets is something they have in 13 years been unable to win for themselves; they dare not risk a free vote. In a decade, 3,000,000 of East Germany's subjects have fled into West Berlin, including in recent months the cream of its technical and professional ranks most needed to carry out Communist plans. Berlin may be an inconvenient outpost for the West to supply, but for the East it is an embarrassing magnet. As a pledge of the West's determination to stay there, Eleanor Dulles, special assistant to the State Department's Office of German Affairs and sister of the Secretary of State, last week described plans for a U.S.-and German-financed $15 million medical training center--to be built in West Berlin between 1959 and 1961.

-Reflecting afterwards on his recent interview, Lippmann concluded that Khrushchev had a newfangled definition of the status quo: the West should recognize all that Russia now has, plus all that it intends to get, in Asia and Africa, by what it considers the inexorable march of events.

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