102
ERIC BENTLEY
they could come, maybe,
to
apologizing to me for the other evening? Or
was there no connection? Was it entirely by chance that the young man
had becom'e communicative? The smile he gave me when returning the
passport and letting me through was not of the routine kind but genuinely
interested and friendly. Or was it?
The Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof feels like a jail. You have the sensa–
tion that you may never again see the light of day. Then suddenly-when
the process of filling out forms and being looked at
is
over-you are
out and on the street. What have you emerged into? Just a street? Noth–
ing in East Berlin, at any rate for the visitor, is
just
anything. It is that
thing in a setting of uncertainty and ghostly unreality. A lack of gay faces,
Time
will have it. That's the formula they've found. One sympathizes
with their plight, given that their readers demand the absolute truth
in a very few words of very bad English and in a form that disturbs
no conventional preconceptions. A lack of gay faces? Sometimes it is,
rather, a lack of faces altogether-I mean where one expects faces to
be,
as, above all, in the streets of a big city. The neighborhood of the
Volksbiihne is very e'erie in this way. The Volksbiihne is a big new
centrally placed theater in the imposing, forbidding style of Soviet
Classical public buildings. This having been a bombed-out area, every
building
in
sight is brand-new, spick and span. But why are there no
people around? One would think it was 5: 00 in the morning. In East
Berlin 5: 00 in the afternoon very often seems to be 5: 00 in the morning,
Is West Berlin any less freakish, though? What can one make of
half a city, surrounded by barbed wire and wall, in the midst of an
enemy zone? (The proposition is as preposterous as it is unprecedented.
And the problems are solved preposterously.) Well, obviously one can
make propaganda, and on the grandest scale. Khrushchev could bluster
about invasion, and Bobby Kennedy could bluster about using the atomic
bomb. Ideals soar higher than spaceships whenever the word Berlin
comes up in Moscow or Washington. It is a useful word, but expensive,
of course. It is expensive to stand guard over Ulbricht-or over Brandt.
But there is profit as well as loss. West B'erlin is a city to invest in, East
Germany is a fine place to rob. And then there are the games that
East and West play with each other! Sometimes Moscow and Washington
tire of them, but Pankow and Bonn, never. Every issue, however real,
becomes a game, played with Teutonic earnestness and
furor.
Both sides
are always right. And wrong. Pick your issue according to your al–
legiance and zest for battle. And the final joke is that for all their
pleas of independence, or even of dependence on Russia or America,
they are dependent on-each other. Behind the pretence of not even
being on speaking terms, West and East Berlin officials have to
be
