BERLIN LETTER
THE CRISIS OF TRADITION IN GERMANY
Berlin, ten years after the end of the war and its blackest
hour, is a reassuring example of how one can settle down, with a good
measure of comfort, among the ruins of one's pride even in a frightened
and precarious world. Even though it is still threatened by the surround–
ing Russians, it is holding on and managing to preserve itself in the
delicate equilibrium of American and Russian power. The present calm
has been accepted, though not without mixed feelings, if not actual re–
gret. After the heroic era of the air lift, the June rebellion in East Berlin,
and the constant clashes with the Russians, Berlin was suddenly off the
front page of the world press, and the Berliner missed a certain glory
and excitement in his daily life.
There
is
hard and quick work of rebuilding being done all over
the western part of the city, and there are, literally, many flowers among
the ruins. For West Berlin, with the subsidies it receives to keep its
unemployed at least intermittently at work, takes great care of its parks
and green patches. It has indeed the most beautiful and imaginative
flower arrangements of any city I know.
In the present calm, the isolated Berliner tries hard to amuse him–
self with the material goods provided by the so-called "German eco–
nomic miracle"; particularly with new cars, driven with the reckless and
ferocious gaiety with which children handle a new toy. After twenty
years of severe material shortages and of officially prescribed sacrifice
the reversal is complete: the devotion to new cars, bikes, technical novel–
ties, is as passionate as that of the American which only a few years
ago had been scorned here as a symptom of a purely materialistic
Weltanschauung.
In this sense Germany has indeed entered a new
philosophic era.
The spirit of this city-state is boisterous, skeptical, and of a curious
optimistic pessimism. One is not shaken by the worst, because one always
expects it and is prepared to make the best of it; there is even a certain
satisfaction in the accurateness of the prognosis as well as pride in hav–
ing braved past disasters. Berlin is also an internationally minded town:
theaters, movies, bookstores offer a rich fare hardly surpassed anywhere.
