Eric Bentley
IN BAHNHOF FRIED,RICHSTRASSE
Summer 1965-if the Berlin Wall didn't exist it would have to
be invented. What could symbolize better how we are placed on earth
side by side but insist on living divided from each other, however irra–
tionally? But then, and this too is symbolic, the Wall has cracks in it.
Through one crack the S-Bahn (Elevated Railroad) runs from West
Berlin to the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof. When you get off the train, noth–
ing tells you, if you are a foreigner, what to do.
If
you look up you see a
couple of guards with rifles or submachine guns slung across their backs,
perched on a kind of balustrade up near the roof.
If
you look down,
there are stairs indicating that West German visitors should go down
them. When for lack of other suggestions you too follow them, you come
to a ticket booth, and there ask where foreigners should go. You are
aware that your question goes not only to the person you speak to but
several others, including policemen, People's Policemen. You are sent
around comers to a point you later come to regard as the world's real
center. At some former date in history it was doubtless just a right-angle
bend
in
a corridor of an old-fashioned railroad station. Fitted up with
new railings, and armed guards, while its lights and furnishings have
been left in a primitive state, it is pure nightmare, and the right angle is
part of a diabolical plan. Waiting rooms had something of this poorly lit,
dirty desolation in the old railroad stations, and this is a railroad station,
and you are waiting. 'Only not for a train. You are waiting to be adjudged
hannless, Well, you are harmless, aren't you? But is that good? 'Or should
you, rather, be th'e very person they wish
to
apprehend-<me who is plot–
ting mischief, arranging to build tunnels through the Wall, or to bring
people through the checkpoints on other people's passports? What would
Antigone be doing? What would Karl Marx be thinking?
The
world of Ulbricht-WaIter Ulbricht and myself actually touched,
