BERLIN LETTER
THE NEW GERMANY
The city looks toward the summit conference
in
May
with feelings of fatalism and apprehension. Since the end of the
blockade more than ten years ago, the people of Berlin have lived
in limbo, neither damned nor saved, constantly protected and
constantly threatened. It is difficult to imagine that this situation
might change. The final lines of Rilke's poem "Requiem" could
serve as a motto for the town:
UUberstehen ist alles"
-
mere
survival is all we can hope for. At present the Berliners are surviv–
ing Khrushchev's most recent threat; it was made nearly a year
and half ago. The ultimatum has been withdrawn, but the threat
remains. Until now, to be sure, it has brought forth not only many
expressions of loyalty and assistance but, oddly enough, an economic
upswing; more orders, more production, more tourists, more recon–
struction. It was of course only a verbal threat and is as yet without
practical consequences; but this city has understood once again how
to make use of adverse circumstances and to contravene the hard
logic of events with a consistency that has enabled it to draw
strength and accelerated recovery from this very contravention and
adversity.
Both reconstruction and planned modernization proceed apace.
The last skyscrapers stand completed in the "City of Tomorrow,"–
a destroyed city quarter that has been altogether razed and rebuilt
as a new residential section, complete with churches, a library,
movie theaters, stores, and cafes, designed by some of the world's
leading architects. Along with German architects, such men as
Gropius, Vago, Niemeyer, Avar Aalto, Stubbins, and-at some dis–
tance, because of the size of his structure-Le Corbusier have
represented here their conceptions of modem living. Financed by
the Federal Republic, and including a large-scale traffic network
with a municipal freeway, new subway lines, public edifices, a new
