(3 of 8)
Last week Berlin's Reuter spoke most eloquently and bravely of all: "You can get the Germans to rearm themselves within a European framework only if you show them a national goal within Europe. The goal for Germany must be to defend itself in Berlin and Eastern Germany. The goal for Europe must be to defend itself in Warsaw and Prague. I don't mean preventive war. I mean that European rearmament must be conceived as a factor in a political offensive against the Soviets, to get them peacefully out of Europe. Why should only the Soviets say, 'Yank, go home! Why don't we all start saying, 'Ivan, scram.' "
On the Blacklist. Sad-eyed, tough-minded Ernst Reuter, 61, is Oberbürger meister (Lord Mayor) of a beleaguered island city 120 miles inside the Iron Curtain, had long since become the symbol of postwar Berlin. He had also become No. 1 German on the Russian blacklist.
Reuter had been on blacklists before. A brilliant, inquisitive student at Marburg, Munich and Münster, with a taste for Greek and Latin poets, he drifted into the Socialist Party before 1912. His father, a small-town Prussian of the old conservative school, promptly disowned him. His radical principles cost him a tutor's job. Undeterred, he entered the workers' movement. Then the antimilitarist Socialists, in one of history's memorable turnabouts, voted for the Kaiser's war of 1914. Reuter dissented, made propaganda for pacifism, but was clapped into the Hohenzollern army.
On the Galician front in 1916 he suffered a serious thigh wound, from which he still limps. The Russians took him prisoner and sent him to the coal mines near Tula, 100 miles south of Moscow.
On the Volga. Reuter learned the Russian language, welcomed the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, organized a soviet among his fellow P.W.s and thereby caught the eye of Nikolai Lenin, who made him Commissar of the German-speaking Volga German Republic.*The appointment put him directly under Joseph Stalin, then Commissar for Nationalities. Reuter had, and still has, deep contempt for Russia's Man of Steel—"a mere drill sergeant," he calls him.
When World War I ended in 1918, the gifted German went back to Berlin. Lenin sent along a shrewd letter of appraisal. "This young Reuter," it read, "has a clear and brilliant head, but he is a bit too independent." Within three years, Reuter's independence drove him from the party.
It was the critical time of Red insurrections in central Germany and their savage suppression. The party's Secretary General Paul Levi protested against the secret part played by Soviet Russian agents in fomenting the insurrections; he stressed the difference between Russia and the West, attacked Bolshevism for its Asiatic character. The party dropped him and Reuter succeeded him. A few months later, the new secretary general, with his knowledge of Russian, discovered that his predecessor's charges were true. In hot rebellion against Russian machinations, Reuter resigned his post and walked back into the Social Democratic Party.