The Islanders

(See Cover)

At Berlin's Tempelhof Airport one morning last week 10,000 Germans stood silent vigil under a warm spring sun. At last, to the strains of The Star Spangled Banner and God Save the Queen, relatives of 71 U.S. and British flyers killed in the Berlin airlift moved forward to place wreaths at the foot of a stark, three-pronged monument that reaches toward the sky like a clutching hand. With one eye on Geneva, West Berlin observed the tenth anniversary of the day the Russians lifted the Berlin blockade.

On hand to help Berlin celebrate were some of the great Allied figures of blockade days: Britain's Earl Attlee, former French Premier Robert Schuman, and, most loudly cheered of all, General Lucius D. Clay, who as U.S. Military Governor in Germany initiated the airlift. But for the people of Berlin, the climax of the ceremonies came when a youngish, slightly rumpled man with a football tackle's build rose to thank the guests of honor for their services to his city a decade ago. Said Willy Brandt, 45, Governing Mayor of West Berlin: "We have not forgotten our friends ... If need be, the people of Berlin are ready to brave new hardships and sacrifices."

In Moscow "all this feverish hullabaloo" was called by Tass "a reactionary attempt to exert pressure" on Geneva. And in a way, Tass was partly right. Fact was that aggressive Willy Brandt was hopefully awaiting an invitation to Geneva to help dramatize his city's plight. Meanwhile, Berlin, the beleaguered "island in the Red sea," was reminding the Western powers that, come Stalin, come Khrushchev, the underlying goals of Soviet foreign policy remain the same. It was also reminding them that the heart of the matter at Geneva is whether West Berlin and its 2,228,500 people will remain free.

The Trap Door. Most of the oratory at Geneva last week was ostensibly devoted to complex and interwoven diplomatic issues--disarmament, security pacts, the reunification of East and West Germany. But one word recurred like an insistent refrain--Berlin, Berlin, Berlin. As U.S. Secretary of State Christian Herter candidly admitted in his opening speech, the Geneva conference was meeting "not because of any change in the political situation which would appear to make solutions more likely." It was meeting only because Nikita Khrushchev had threatened the peace of the world by proclaiming his intention to evict the Western powers from Berlin.

Whatever he hoped to gain from it, Khrushchev could hardly have found a more effective lever than his threat against Berlin. Militarily, Berlin is a net liability to the Western powers--an indefensible position tying down 11,000 crack troops who would probably be expendable if war broke. Economically, Berlin is an apparently bottomless pit into which the U.S. and West German governments have poured almost $4 billion in direct aid since 1950--the equivalent of about $1,800 apiece for every West Berliner. But as a kind of trap door, opening up 110 miles inside the Communist empire, Berlin has incalculable political value to the West.

From their Berlin vantage point, the Western powers confront the interior of the Communist world with a visible example of freedom in action. From Berlin, Western powers draw back their most accurate intelligence of what is going on in Eastern Europe. More important, Berlin constitutes the Soviet empire's greatest escape hatch. Through West Berlin every day there still pass some 250 East Germans--not just the aged and infirm, but the ablest and most vigorous citizens of an East German satellite crucial to Moscow's economic and political plans.

Twice in eleven years, in its anxiety to strengthen their hold on Eastern Europe, Russia has sought to snuff out Berlin's liberty. By their refusal to panic, their stouthearted willingness to risk economic hardship rather than accept subjection, Berliners have won the world's admiration. Today, in the tower of Berlin's City Hall, hangs the "Freedom Bell"--a copy of Philadelphia's Liberty Bell, given to Berlin by the people of the U.S.

Small World. For the unforgiving, who cannot forget the Nazis' cruel conquests, there is savage irony in the fact that the Freedom Bell now rings out daily over the city that was the capital of Adolf Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich. But the Nazis never won a free election in Berlin, even failed to get a majority in the first municipal elections held there after Hitler came to power.

The Berliner's password is "Mir kann keener"--"Nobody can put anything over on me"--and his instinctive reaction to totalitarianism, as it is to anything highfalutin, is a deflating wisecrack. The airlift memorial at which last week's anniversary ceremonies began is universally known to Berliners as "the Hunger Claw"; a modernistic postwar church that looks as though a train might pull into it at any moment is called "Jesus Station." When Berliners use the high-flown expressions coined to describe their city's cold-war role--"the beacon of freedom" or "the show window of democracy"--there is always a sardonic edge to their voices.

The Berliners' own name for themselves is "die Insulaner"--the islanders. Implicit in the phrase is an awareness of living in a world that for all practical purposes has an area of only 186 square miles. (The unpredictability of the East German police, which discourages most West Berliners from venturing into "the Zone," bears particularly hard on warm summer weekends when the road to the city's one big public resort, the suburban lake of Wannsee, is jammed with virtually every car in Berlin.)

Beneath Berliners' skepticism and grumbling lies a profound conviction, born of intimate acquaintance with tyranny, that liberty is a highly tangible good that is worth a considerable price. In pursuit of that good, postwar Berliners have demonstrated their political maturity by choosing leaders of rare sophistication, ability and high principle. When the Berlin blockade struck in 1948, West Berlin rallied behind the late great Mayor Ernst Reuter (TIME, Sept. 18, 1950), a tough, aristocratic Socialist with a deeply etched face, who fought Communism with the scornful courage of a man who had known it from the inside. And when Nikita Khrushchev touched off the second Berlin crisis last November, the city was in the hands of a man who may one day loom even larger in German history than Reuter--magnetic, hard-driving Willy Brandt.

The Tailored Socialist. A meticulous dresser with a penchant for vests--his opponents call him "the Socialist in the tailored suit"--Brandt has a tousled, bear-like charm that reminds some U.S. acquaintances of Wendell Willkie. An intense man of vast nervous energy, Willy is fundamentally so reserved that people who have known him for years argue that he has no true intimates outside his immediate family. But his quick humor and casual, common touch have given most West Berliners a sense of personal friendship with their mayor, and a proprietary interest in all his affairs. Where Ernst Reuter, the well-born Prussian, invariably got a respectful tip of the hat, ordinary Berliners hail Brandt with the familiar greeting, " 'n Abend, Willy."

Politically as well as personally, Willy fits no standard pattern. Keenly aware that he has an international responsibility, Willy keeps on good terms with his avowed political opponent, Christian Democrat Konrad Adenauer. And though Willy never directly attacks the dreamily neutralist foreign policy espoused by his "superiors" in the Socialist Party, he blithely ignores it by declaring: "We cannot with clear conscience accept any East-West solutions that would weaken the overall Western position."

No More Banners. In public, Willy's relations with West German Socialist Boss Erich Ollenhauer are polite. But pudgy, ineffectual Ollenhauer recognizes in Willy an increasingly dangerous contender for party leadership. Last winter, when an excited aide burst into Ollenhauer's Bonn office to report that Willy had led West Berlin Socialists to a smashing electoral victory, Ollenhauer growled: "What's so wonderful about that?"

The conflict between Willy and Ollenhauer is also an ideological conflict between two generations of Socialists. Many of the party's senior bureaucrats cling to the gospel according to Karl Marx, still talk wistfully of a "state-guided economy." They have lost the last three national elections. Willy argues that "the magic word 'nationalization' is no longer justified. The problem is how . . . private and public capital are to be harmonized." If German Socialism is to get more than its immovable 30% of the votes, he insists, "it must have a wider base than a single class," must become less doctrinaire to win middle-class appeal. "Let's not start making any new red banners," he says. "It's not the fashion nowadays."

The Young Falcon. Willy's moderate Socialism represents the Scandinavian strain in him--the most important influence in his life. He was born Herbert Karl Frahm, the illegitimate child of a shopgirl in the Baltic German port of Liibeck. The companionship he could not find at home he sought in the "Red Falcons," prewar Germany's Socialist youth movement. He got into his first slugging match with the Nazis at 17, was rarely out of trouble thereafter. By 19 he was writing for Socialist newspapers, serving as a functionary of the far-left Socialist Workers' Party, and was, an old acquaintance recalls, "as close to Red as you can get without actually being Red." In 1933. already in the Gestapo's black books, and disgusted with the German Socialists' collapse before Hitler, he fled to Norway under the pseudonym Willy Brandt--the name he has borne ever since.

In Norway Willy supported himself by newspapering. (In the 1957 German Who's Who he still listed himself a "journalist.") But his real profession was politics. He became the moving spirit of the German refugee colony in Oslo, won such esteem among Scandinavian Socialists that some of them still argue that he would in time have become Foreign Minister of Norway. Willy gained political maturity there, and a deep affection for Scandinavia that has never left him. Even today he speaks Norwegian at home, and most of the personal friends invited to the Brandts' five-room duplex in Berlin's Zehlendorf district are Scandinavian.

Fatherly Friend. When the Nazis invaded Norway in 1940, Willy found himself in personal danger. Up to his neck in anti-Nazi plots--he had even spent six months back in Nazi Germany using forged Norwegian papers--he was wanted by the Gestapo. At the urging of Norwegian friends, he donned Norwegian uniform, was flung into a P.W. camp along with the defeated Norwegian army, released as harmless after five weeks. At war's end, after almost five years in refuge in Sweden, he turned up in Germany again, first as a Norwegian correspondent, then as press attache to the Norwegian military mission in Berlin.

When he arrived in Berlin, a Norwegian citizen with the rank of major in the Norwegian army, Brandt had no intention of resettling in the land of his birth. Already he was planning marriage to Rut Hansen, lively blonde widow of a Norwegian journalist. (His first marriage, also to a Norwegian girl, ended in divorce in 1947.) His privileged status as a member of the Allied occupation forces assured him of a luxurious existence that no German could dream of matching. But under the influence of Ernst Reuter, whom he still emotionally recalls as his "fatherly friend," Willy's interest in German politics began to revive. In early 1948 he became a German citizen again. His explanation: "It is better to be the only democrat in Germany than one of many in Norway, where everyone understands democracy."

"Frau, Komm!" The city where Willy Brandt decided to stay was in 1948 still little better than a charnel house. A million of Berlin's prewar inhabitants were dead or had fled. With morbid ingenuity, a statistician calculated that the rubble in West Berlin alone would have sufficed to build 51 Cheops pyramids. And still vivid in the minds of every Berliner were the last nightmare days of the war, when Russian' troops raged through its streets with the dread cry, "Frau, komm!" (Woman, come!).

Yet even at its most despairing moments after World War II, Berlin never sank to the depths of self-pitying neuroticism and decadence that characterized post-World War I Berlin. Within weeks after Hitler's death in a Berlin bunker, Berliners were singing a defiant pop song called Berlin Will Rise Again.

Its words did not really begin to come true until the Berlin blockade. At first surprised when the Western Allies did not abandon them to the Russians, Berliners acquired new drive and hope from partnership with their conquerors. The U.S. itself, rudely made aware of Berlin's cold-war significance, began pouring aid funds into the city, totaling 39% of all U.S. postwar aid to Germany.

The Road to Istanbul. Sprawling like a grey barracks town across the sandy Brandenburg plain, Berlin was never even in its heyday apt to win any urban beauty prizes. The scars of war still remain. From the spanking new Berlin Hilton, the visitor looks out at acre upon acre of wasteland--the ruins of Berlin's former diplomatic quarter. West Berlin's biggest prewar railroad station is still a burnt-out shell. And even the vaunted Kurfuersten-damm, for all its movie palaces and glass-walled sidewalk cafes (with infra-red heating for winter), will not bear comparison with the fashionable shopping districts of Paris and London.

Nonetheless, West Berlin today is in throbbing good health. It is West Germany's biggest industrial city (electrical and construction equipment, pharmaceuticals and fashion), with production running at nearly $2 billion a year. Since 1950 West Berlin has built 150,000 new apartments--v. 25,000 for East Berlin--and enough new roads to stretch, strung together, all the way to Istanbul. Its film studios, one of which is located in a former poison-gas factory, are Germany's, biggest; its Free University (11,000 students)--built with U.S. aid as a substitute for Humboldt University, which lies in East Berlin--is second only to Munich's. And to compensate for its unrepaired ruins, West Berlin also has some of the world's most striking modern buildings, including the low-cost Hansa Quarter housing development, a pastel "city of tomorrow" designed .by some of the world's leading architects.

Even the threat of a new blockade has not halted Berlin's growth. Since Khrushchev's November ultimatum, the giant Siemens electrical company has announced an $8,400,000 expansion program. If need be, the city is prepared to live on its fat for quite a while. At a cost of more than $350 million, West Berlin has doubled its stocks of food, fuel and raw materials, now has at least a year's supply in its warehouses, from coal to frozen meat. Says a top city official: "If it comes, it will be a comfortable blockade this time. We have even got coffee and cigars."

Singing Diversion. As Berlin rose, so did the fortunes of Willy Brandt. He became successively a member of the Socialist Party executive in Berlin, a deputy in the West Berlin parliament and, finally, its presiding officer. But all along he was dogged by the dislike of the oldline pols in "The Barracks" (Socialist headquarters in Bonn), who headed off his election to the national party executive. For a while, after the death of his sponsor, Mayor Reuter, he seemed stuck in the party's second echelon.

The turning point came on a restless day in November 1956, when some 75,000 young West Berliners assembled to protest Soviet intervention in Hungary. Impatient with the inanities spoken to them by a series of Socialist orators, the crowd began to shout, "To the Brandenburg Gate!"--the great arch on the boundary between East and West Berlin. All that averted a bloody clash with Soviet occupation forces in East Berlin was the quickwitted intervention of Willy Brandt. He shrewdly urged them to march on a memorial to the victims of Communist tyranny in West Berlin, well out of the way, where he got them to sing the national anthem and eventually quieted them. A year later, still riding on the city's gratitude that he won that day, Willy was elected mayor.

Today when Willy Brandt passes, many a West German politician declares confidently: "There goes the future Chancellor of Germany." If Willy can ever realize his dream of modernizing the Socialist Party's policies, they may prove right.

The one reservation Willy's friends have about his future is the fear that he is driving himself too hard. Despite a longstanding resolve to spend at least an hour a day with sons Peter, 11, and Lars, 7, he now sees little of his family. A reluctant riser who must be handled like nitroglycerine until he has had his morning coffee and a few cigarettes, Willy leaves home at 8:30, works through in his office in Berlin's Schoneberger Rat-haus until 6 or 7 p.m. (To his wife's complaints over his habit of lunching at his desk, Willy says: "A good thing I have no time for much eating ... I eat noth ing and keep getting fatter.") And since the Berlin crisis began, his speaking engagements, his personal meetings with foreign dignitaries and visiting newsmen have often kept him away from home until midnight.

Inside the Grinder. Some of Willy's late evenings are by his own choice; once he settles down with good company and schnapps, he hates to go home. But essentially, the crowded life he leads is inseparable from being mayor of Berlin --a job that, says one of his friends, "is a little like trying to operate a meat grinder from the inside."

As mayor of Berlin, Willy Brandt has duties no ordinary mayor has--protocol responsibilities as the head of a quasi-autonomous state, and the responsibility for liaison with Allied commanders in the city. He also has a unique set of problems. According to East German officials, some 48 Western "terror," espionage and propaganda organizations operate out of West Berlin. Inevitably, their endless, shadowy war with the 60,000 Communist agents operating out of East Germany creates clamorous incidents in West Berlin, exposes the city to endless complaints from Moscow. Willy, like most Berliners, has come to regard some of the underground groups as "grownups playing cowboys and Indians," would like to find a way to rid his city of "certain undesirable activities in the twilight zone of political propaganda."

What worries Willy even more is the flood of refugees who pour daily into West Berlin, most of them ultimately to be flown out to the "mainland" of West Germany. Since the majority of the refugees are young, their flight is turning East Germany into a nation of oldsters; it is also creating a labor shortage in East Germany. Since 1949 more than 2,000,000 people have fled East Germany--more than three times the natural population increase. Says Willy Brandt: "When East Germans ask me what to do ... I tell them to stay as long as they can manage." His reason: the fear that if the population drain continues, the Russians may begin to resettle East Germany with other people, bringing the Slav tide to the edge of Berlin.

Intellectuals' Flight. So far, the Russians have shown no signs of going to such lengths. They no longer so onerously exploit the East Germans, who now have what is probably the best standard of living in the Communist world. Many of East Germany's vaunted economic gains are all show: the bulk of the new housing in East Berlin is on the spectacular but dead Stalinallee. And with a total automobile production last year of 36,000, East Germany still has a long way to go to catch up economically with West Germany, which produced more than 1,000,000. But it has been a year since East Germans needed ration cards to buy food.

Nonetheless, the flight to the West continues. Increasingly, the refugees are members of the intellectual elite essential to the functioning of a modern state--teachers (3,400 in 1958), doctors (more than 850), scientists (375). Most refugees flee

East Germany not because of hunger or poverty, but because they find Communist political restrictions intolerable to themselves and to their children. Says Willy Brandt: "I have factual evidence that each time the Russians scold the East Germans for not getting ahead with this or that plan, the East Germans answer: 'Berlin, Berlin, Berlin.'"

Hothouse Flower. In his ultimatum last November, Nikita Khrushchev proposed a neat solution to his troubles in East Germany: make West Berlin a "free city" totally divorced from Allied or West German control. As Khrushchev was well aware, his plan would ultimately spell West Berlin's ruin simply by ending its economic and financial integration with West Germany. (Politically, the city has never been legally integrated into the Federal Republic because that would be a violation of the wartime agreements with Moscow on which the U.S., Britain and France base their right to maintain occupation troops in West Berlin.)

West Berlin's flourishing economy is a hothouse flower. It is nourished not only by direct U.S. aid, but also by innumerable subsidies from Bonn. Its personal and corporate income taxes are 20% lower than those in the rest of West Germany; Its businessmen do not pay the 4% tax on all transactions that other West German businessmen do. The Bonn government equalizes freight charges on steel shipments to Berlin, and in effect gives businessmen free insurance on all shipments to and from the city. And for eight long years all West Germans except Berliners had to paste an extra "Berlin Contribution" stamp on every letter they mailed; so unpopular was this measure--it always made the change come out uneven--that in one West German city a Mercedes limousine bearing West Berlin plates was vengefully plastered from stem to stern with Berlin Contribution stamps. (Yet 14 million Brandenburg Gate lapel pins have recently been sold in West Germany as a sign of German unity.)

For several years past, West Berlin's leaders have worried over the tendency of its young people to seek careers in West Germany proper. Already more than half West Berlin's population is over 45, and an abnormally large group--16%--is over 65. The hothouse flower needs constant tending.

The Consequence. In the first weeks after Khrushchev's alternative, it was Willy Brandt as much as any man who set the pattern of Western reaction. What Khrushchev intended to do, said Brandt, was to establish "a concentration camp on the installment plan." As for Soviet talk of Berlin as a threat to peace: "This so-called crisis is an artificial product of Soviet policy . . . Berlin is neither a cancer nor a soft spot." Later, in a flying visit around the world, Brandt helped to keep public attention focused on Berlin's plight, hammered away at the proposition that "Berlin is not a cause but a consequence"--a consequence of the division of Germany.

This was the crux of the position that the Western powers took at Geneva last week. It was also a position that Nikita Khrushchev ("No one really wants German reunification--no one") clearly refused to accept. Yet nothing short of reunification of Germany in freedom could possibly justify the withdrawal of Western occupation forces from Berlin. However much the oratory at Geneva might becloud the issue, Berlin's cold-eyed citizens were keenly aware of these realities. "We'll do well not to expect too much from the Geneva conference," Brandt told his Berliners last week. "It's better to be pleasantly surprised."

As people who have long since learned to look reality in the face, Willy Brandt's Berliners unflinchingly accept the prospect that they will remain islanders for a long time to come.

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