BERLIN CONGRESS
717
was like an act of parturition. In Berlin he spoke with unwonted fluency.
He was one of the few remaining links with the culture of the Weimar
Republic.)
At a subsequent session, after a particularly lively give and take, a
student who had secretly traveled from the University of Leipzig to
listen to the discussion asked for permission to address the Congress. He
described briefly the enforced uniformity of belief which was officially
imposed on students in the East, his delight at witnessing the free ex–
change of opinion, and declared his intention never to return to East
Germany.
The Congress wound up with a mass meeting in the Summergarden
of the Funkturm before an audience of 15,000 at which the Manifesto
of Freedom and Message to the East were read. Among the speakers was
Boris Nicolaevsky who spoke of peace and freedom to the Russian people
over the heads of their government.
II.
West Berlin of course is not West Germany.
It
is not stuffy, self–
pitying or conservative. Although predominantly Social-Democratic, the
Social-Democratic party there is not a conventional one based on fixed
economic dogmas. Despite its programmatic differences with the other
two major parties, it recognizes that the basic issue which unites them
all is whether freedom is to survive. And islanded in the Soviet sea,
everyone knows what freedom is. The material situation in Berlin had
vastly improved over the period of 1948 when I . was last there at the
height of the blockade. But the spirit was the same-the toughness, sense
of humor, bitterness towards everything Nazi and disdain towards every–
thing Communist, not Russian. These people believe that they suffer a
common oppression with the Russian masses at the hands of the men in
the Kremlin.
If
there is a democratic center in Germany, it is here. Its
leaders are anti-Nazis, who spent the Hitler period either in prison or in
exile, and are free of any German nationalist taint. Without them the
West could not have held Berlin. Their lives will be immediately forfeit,
if the Soviets march. For many months a Communist whispering cam–
paign had circulated the rumor that the West would withdraw from
Berlin. It was finally scotched by the U.S. action in Korea. The thousands
of people who crowded the sessions of the Congress were the vanguard
of the democratic resistance of West Berlin. One could not forget their
presence for a moment, and the points they punctuated with their ap–
plause showed they were listening intelligently. With few exceptions,
