The Wailing Wall

In crisis or in calm, the citizens of Berlin like to go to the opera, and they like to go in style. Since the war, though, the only suitable house in the city has been the ancient Staatsoper on Unter den Linden in the Eastern sector, and operagoing has been a mixed pleasure for people from the Western half of the city. But last week crisis-weary West Berliners finally had their way. The striking new $7,000,000 Deutsche Oper Berlin, four years in the building, was opened on the site of West Berlin's old Deutsches Opernhaus, which was gutted by Allied bombs in 1943.

Hours before curtain time, 10,000 people pressed behind police lines to watch the first-night show; many lingered till midnight at their sidewalk stations, peeping through the glass sides of the block-long building as the crowd inside washed down cookies with Rhineland champagne. A fleet of taxis and Mercedes limousines flowed onto Bismarckstrasse, off RichardWagner-Platz, to deliver the cream of West Berlin society, the entire West Berlin Senate, West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt, Federal President Heinrich Luebke, retired U.S. General Lucius Clay, and 21 assorted ambassadors up from Bonn for the occasion. But for all the glitter, it was a subdued affair as opera openings go. There were black ties and evening gowns aplenty, but Luebke and Brandt, mindful of the divided city's precarious situation, shunned the traditional white tie and tails for business suits. One woman sported a pink mink jacket, but not a single diamond tiara could be seen in the house.

Swan Song. To start the season, Director Carl Ebert chose Mozart's Don Giovanni. The performance was to be a swan song for Ebert, who fled Germany in 1933 to become a U.S. citizen, returned to Berlin in 1954 to take up his old job as director of the City Opera. He was scheduled to retire after opening night, and he left on a high note. At opera's end, the audience enthusiastically applauded Native Son Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who sang Don Giovanni brilliantly, but the wildest cheers of its 15-minute ovation were for Ebert. The following night new Director Gustav Rudolf Sellner was not so lucky. He bowed in with avant-garde Composer Giselher Klebe's new opera, Alkmene, an academic, humorless scoring of the ribald Amphitryon legend, in which that incorrigible old satyr Jupiter turns himself into Amphitryon's double to woo Amphitryon's handsome wife.

Less than Ecstatic. Delighted though they were that their City Opera had suitable quarters for the first time since the end of the war, West Berliners were less than ecstatic about Architect Fritz Bornemann's barren modern design. The opera's enormous, slablike stone fagade, 660 ft. long and 126 ft. high, was quickly dubbed the "Wailing Wall."

But despite their criticism, Berliners were grateful that the opera was there, mindful that a mere three miles to the east, near the Brandenburg Gate, grim East German Volkspolizei stood guard over a smaller but far less attractive "Wailing Wall"--the eight-foot barrier of concrete and barbed wire that has turned West Berlin into a ghetto of freedom.

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