GERMANY: Herr Berlin

The last time West Berliners saw their lord mayor in public was at the end of an evening of Wagner in their Municipal Opera House. The last chord of the Gotterdämmerung had ebbed, the lights were up, the audience rose to go. Burly, hunched Ernst Reuter still sat in his center loge, his eyes bright, abstractedly beating time with nicotine-stained forefinger to some passage of the music that had died. Two days later Ernst Reuter, rumpled, undaunted hero of the cold war, died at his modest home of a heart attack.

Without him, West Berlin would not be the same.

Commissar. Ernst Reuter was the symbol of his city's will to be free, and of his nation's will to unite. He stood where worlds collide, and was not dwarfed; he gazed down the cannon's throat and refused to be afraid. West Berlin is still a far-flung outpost, tempest-lashed in a Red sea. Cold war is its way of life and the Iron Curtain its backyard fence, yet in five years as mayor, Reuter refused to accept his city as an island. "Call it a spearhead," he said with a faint grin, and by his courage he made it one.

Reuter was a Prussian who became a pacifist. He was a Socialist who knew what Communism was about, because he had once been a Communist. Fighting on the Russian front in World War I, he was wounded and captured by the Czar's army. They set him to work in the coal mines, south of Moscow. The Red Revolution freed him, and Nikolai Lenin himself made Reuter a commissar in the new U.S.S.R. His boss in the Commissariat of Nationalities was Joseph Stalin, whom he afterwards dismissed as a man with "the mind of a sergeant."

Reuter went back to Berlin in 1918. A letter from Lenin recommended him as "a man with a brilliant and lucid mind—but a little too independent." Reuter soon broke with the Reds and returned to Socialism. Pravda called him a warmonger.

Elected to the Reichstag years later, he spoke out against Hitler and was twice put into concentration camp by the Nazis. When he got out he took refuge in London (where he learned his fluent and colorful English), then skipped to Turkey, where he mastered the language and lectured on city government. At the end of World War II, Ernst Reuter was eking out a living in Ankara. He rushed home to Berlin.

Man of Hope. "The city lay in ruins," he wrote afterwards. "Barren, rigid as an icy waste, dead. A horrible hopelessness seemed to pervade the atmosphere." Reuter's first historic achievement was to give Berlin hope.

Reuter's long-memoried Socialists elected him mayor. His slouching figure, encased in flapping, light raincoat and surmounted by a cheeky black beret, soon became a familiar sight in West Berlin. Poking in the ruins with his thick, brown cane, strolling through the Tiergarten, where he would sometimes help the Haus-frauen gather sticks for their fires, Ernst Reuter became a man whom the people loved. They called him Herr Berlin.