The World: No Man's Land

Few pieces of real estate have ever fitted the definition of no man's land quite so thoroughly as the 21-acre site of Berlin's old Potsdam railroad station. During the war, Allied bombers pounded the place into rubble. In 1945, the ruins became part of the Russian sector of the occupied city and were later included in what is now East Berlin, even though they protruded like a battered thumb into central West Berlin. In 1961, when the Communists built the Wall to close off their portion of the divided city, they did not bother to extend the barrier around the perimeter of the barren site. Instead, they simply sealed it off from the rest of East Berlin with their "death strip."

Tensions between the divided halves of the city have relaxed somewhat since the signing of the four-power Berlin accord. The most recent sign: East Berlin has allowed the West Berlin government to buy the station property —for $10 million. The West Berliners plan to develop the land for commercial purposes, but the sale came about so suddenly when East Berlin finally decided to sell that details have not been worked out.

Acquisition of the site will also help straighten out several roads that had to be detoured around it. Even so, the Potsdam station is evidently not going to yield to liberation without a struggle. On the instructions of worried West Berlin officials, workmen last week were stringing lines of barbed wire along its boundaries. There were fears that curious West Berliners, poking around in the ruins, might be crushed by the crumbling walls of the old Haus Vaterland dance hall, which stood near the station ruins, or blown up by unexploded bombs and artillery shells left there since World War II.