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Sounds of Death. West Berliners watch fretfully as the barricade grows more formidable and its servants' marksmanship improves. The Wall has become an all-pervasive part of life in Berlin. At their backs, West Berliners feel the cold-eyed scrutiny of the Communist cops, whose duty is to guard their frontier not from those outside, but against their own people. Hardly a night passes without the rattle of gunfire and the sounds of death from the other side. To West Berliners, the Wall is a calendar: they will recall a date by saying, "It happened the month before the Wall." It is a direction finder: strangers in search of a Gartenstrasse bordello are told to follow the Wall until they see the wooden screens that the Communist border guards put up to end East-West flirtation.
Bernauerstrasse, where the windows and doorways of a row of houses have been bricked up for several blocks to become part of the Wall, is now a standard West Berlin tourist attraction. So are the partsof the Wall that stretch through the working-class districts of Wedding and Neukölln, whose fiercely independent inhabitants can sometimes be seen lobbing rocks at the Reds for summer evening sport.
Marxist Maginot. At the Potsdamer Platz, which was Berlin's Times Square before the Wall truncated it, visiting sightseers mount wooden stands to gawk at the bare, dead city beyond. "In one quick look," they nod, "you can see what Communism is like." Berliners proudly point out each place where the Wall has been breached: eight celebrated holes in the ground where East-West tunnelers surfaced; the spot on the River Spree where 14 East Berliners turned pirate and steered an excursion boat to freedom. On the Wall's grey blocks of compressed rubble they scrawl elaborate imprecations against East Germany's Red Boss Walter Ulbricht and his commissars; one of the politest avers, "They think like Eichmann." And wherever Germans from the other side have died trying to escape Ulbricht's prison camp, West Berliners mark the spot with crosses that seldom lack for flowers.
Though the Wall itself ends in the U.S. sector, at East Germany's Schonefeld airport, watchtowers and barbed-wire barriers also seal the city's 65-mile western border with the Soviet zone. And that does not count the 830-mile Marxist Maginot line that seals East Germany's western frontier from the Baltic to Czechoslovakia. This is what Walter Ulbricht cynically calls the Democratic Anti-Fascist Protection Wall; already it boasts 500 watchtowers, 1,000 fortified bunkers, 93 miles of minefields, and throughout its length, the wide, plowed strips of earth where a footprint can be seen from a distance, alerting guards with savage dogs to another escape attempt.
Fatal Pause. In fact, Ulbricht's prison wall is a cynical denial of the human rights that are recognized by every civilized society, and even fraudulently guaranteed by the East German constitution, which pledges: "Every citizen has the right to emigrate." To Germans, the Wall's greatest mischief is its aim of permanently dismembering a divided nation whose people yearn to be reunified. West Berliners themselves must also think of their city's welfare. Said West Berlin's Mayor Willy Brandt last week: "The Wall must go, but until it goes, the city must live."