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.
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