IAHNHOF
103
meeting
all
the time. The very feces of West Berlin are taken care of by
East Berlin-boy, do they need each other!
If
the elaborate patterns of life in the East bloc suggest meaning–
lessness, the no less elaborate pattern of East-West relations suggests
falrery. To this latter pattern, of course, one comes better prepared.
That every moral gesture or utterance should
be
a phony is something
one has been brought up to whatever one's origin. Berlin provides only
new examples. For instance, on arriving in West Berlin, I was informed
that the elevated railway, being East property, was being boycotted by the
West, and I should not invest my twenty pfennigs in it. But as an
observer, I felt I had a prior obligation to observe. Upon observing, I
found the El full (or half full) of other Westerners, albeit mostly of such
as didn't have too many pfennigs
to
invest in the politicians' high ideals.
Checking back with the secretarial lady who had given me the warning,
I found that her own ideals really weren't all that high-her objection
to the EI was precisely that dirty and ill-clad people were to be seen on it.
Let them eat cake-and travel on the (more expensive) subway! The
same lady expressed surprise that I was willing
to
visit Wedding. I was
visiting something as respectable as an art gallery there, but
it
is a working
class section.
What a wond'erful essay could
be
written if there were a Swift around
on the way both sides
make
free with the
word
Free. The East, as is
known, has real freedom, instead of formal freedom. But that's nothing.
The West has plain old genuine Freedom, of which the capital F reaches
God.
And far from having a subtle, wire-drawn, Jesuitical definition,
this Freedom has one unambiguous meaning: that you're not in the East
bloc. Spain and Portugal are free, Taiwan and South Vietnam are free.
So
do not run away with the idea that the Free in Free University
(of Berlin) means that no charge is made for tuition. On the contrary.
It means that the faculty may
be
Nazis but that they certainly aren't
Communists. Hence, there is no great parade, at the Free University,
of that formal freedom which the Marxists make fun of. Free speech,
for example, does 110t exist there. The Rektor recently stopped Erich
Kuby from speaking there. (Kuby is a liberal journalist, whose work
has
recently appeared in
Der Spiegel.
His crime was having made a joke
about the word "free" in the phrase Free University.) In welcoming
Saragat to the special freedom of this particular borough, the same
Rektor reverently invoked the name of the one important Italian
philosopher who supported Mussolini (Gentile).
The biggest recent scandal at this Free institution occurred in my
own field of theater and drama. When the Free University was set up
in 1949, with all the trumpets of Freedom blaring, the man they chose
