West Germany: It Is Still There

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Two years have passed since Berlin was severed by the Wall. On its anniversary last week, most West Berliners heeded official appeals to refrain from violent, futile demonstrations. Instead, they observed the day quietly by placing wreaths on the dozens of crosses marking each spot where a fleeing East German had been shot to death by Com munist guards. Only late in the evening was the city's grave calm broken by a mob of some 2,000 hell-raising West Berliners who surged into the area around Checkpoint Charlie, hurling rocks and insults across the Wall into the Soviet sector.

If Germans have learned to live with the Berlin Wall and the deadly, 830-mile barricade that divides the rest of their nation, on neither side have they forgotten or forgiven its existence. The most eloquent evidence of East Germans' refusal to accept Sovietization is that 16,456 of them have risked their lives and fled to the West since the Wall went up. Among them were 1,304 members of East Germany's army and police force, enough to form 13 companies. At least 65 more East Germans are known to have been killed while attempting to escape.

Facts of Life. Despite this somber chronicle of flight and death, many politicians and pundits outside Germany still cling to the notion — based in part on deep-rooted fear of resurgent German power — that its people are gradually becoming reconciled to their coun try's partition. In West Germany itself, this view is accepted in some quarters, mostly because it is a fact of present European life that the Russians cannot be moved out of East Germany, except by war, a West German surrender to Communism, or some kind of settlement for which West Germany might have to pay a ruinous price. As a result, many Germans are beginning to ponder measures that fall, short of actual reunification—such as trade pressure—designed to persuade Communist Boss Walter Ulbricht to give East Germans a little more freedom and a somewhat better life.

Franz Thedieck, State Secretary for All-German Affairs, said recently: "Of course we would like to see Germany reunited, but if there were conditions of freedom in East Germany the existence of one single German state would not be absolutely necessary." Existential Philosopher Karl Jaspers created a furor by suggesting in 1960 that his countrymen must accept changes in the map of Germany as part of their liability for Hitler. Many Germans now accept his thought: "The only thing that counts is freedom. Compared with that, reunification is a matter of indifference."

But the thought is largely academic, since it would be almost as difficult to liberalize the Ulbricht regime as to get the Russians out of East Germany. The Jaspers line thus may temper but does not eliminate the basic urge for reunification in a country which achieved national unity later than other European nations and is fiercely insistent on its ethnic identity. That fact is at the heart of Bonn's opposition to any East-West agreement that would formally or psychologically seal the status quo in Germany and Europe. Says a Western ambassador in Bonn: "The issue of German unity still has more explosive potential than any other issue on the political scene in Germany today. We'd be fools to underestimate it."