Berlin Report: Summer, 1952

Abstract

despite the effects of the second world war and of the shadow cast over the city by the Cold War. About 50 per cent, of Berlin was destroyed by the ground and air fighting. Since 1945, the city has not recovered any of its functions as national capital. The Reichstag stands a roofless shell beside the newly replanted Tiergarten, while the Reichs Chancellery and most of the buildings on the Wilhelmstrasse have disappeared. Since 1945 also, Berlin has been a peculiar victim of the hardening of administrative lines in Germany; eloquent testimony both to the immediate post-war belief that four power harmony could be preserved and to the total failure to consider the risks and consequences if it could not. Consequently Berlin has been gradually cut off from its hinterland. It is separated from its friends by 120 miles of hostile territory. Most seriously, it was divided in 1945 by an illogical administrative line which has resulted, with the development of the Cold War, in the progressive tightening of the stronghold of the Soviet Zone on the city. The exits are now patrolled more effectively by East German police and Russian sentries than at any time since the blockade. Perhaps only the degree to which the life of the eastern and western sectors of the city are separated by the Cold War line has been exaggerated by western press reports. Unlike Vienna, Berlin is by no means a city throughout which one can move without inconvenience and practically without fear. On the other hand, the prevailing impression that the sector boundary is as closely guarded and as infrequently trespassed as the border between the Eastern Zone and the Federal Republic is simply not true. Connecting eastern and western Berlin are said to be 273 streets, and the physical problem of enforcing Kontrolle may well be the factor which has deterred the Russians from attempting to seal off this chink in the Iron Curtain. In many cases the sector boundary runs down the centre of a street: in the Stresemannstrasse, for example, one can stand in front of a quiet shop in the western sector and watch the food queues on the opposite pavement. Although communist whims may alter the situation at any moment, the only form of inter-sector control at present is a superficial checking of cars. This is done, well back on both sides of the line, not by Soviet and Allied troops but by eastern and western German police, and simply as an attempt to check the flourishing smuggling traffic. Few trams run across the dividing line, but each hour thousands of Berliners travel