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Work-relief projects, financed with U.S. Army funds, absorbed some of the idle. On warm days this summer, women of all classes were wielding picks and shovels. Men who had been clerks, plumbers, doctors or lawyers worked beside them. Often they grumbled. "The man in the street, he's always the one that's got to pay. Don't talk to me about the good life in West Berlin," said one. Another replied: "Why don't you go over to the East then?" This question, as always in Berlin, stopped the grumbler in his tracks. "You know why," he answered. "I can't keep my mouth shut—and don't want to."
Beyond the difficulties of everyday living, West Berliners resented particularly the Bonn government, which begrudged them money and would not press the Allies to allow Berlin as a full-fledged Land or state in the Federal Republic. They resented almost as much the stubborn French opposition to Berlin joining the Bonn regime. They worried about Allied flabbiness and the general state of Western strength. The Korean war had made Berliners ask: "If the Americans can't stop Communism there, how can they defend us?"
But Berliners did not seem afraid. "We're past fearing," said a taxi driver. "We made up our minds long ago. All we can do is work and wait."
Work & Wait. Along with his people, Ernst Reuter was working and waiting. In his modest home in the suburb of Zehlendorf, in the U.S. sector, he got up every morning at 7:30 and ate a modest breakfast. ("He has no time for exercise and he doesn't want to get fat," his petite, redheaded wife explained.) At 8:15, he set a black beret on his unruly grey hair, picked up his cane and went out to his official car, a black Mercedes sedan. At 8:30, he arrived at the great, grey Rathaus Schoneberg and walked to his high-ceilinged office on the second floor. There he started out on his null 6-hour day of reading reports, inspecting municipal installations, conferring with top German colleagues with such Allied officials as the U.S. Commander in Berlin, Major General Maxwell D. Taylor, attending dinners or more conferences at night.
Reuter also had to make frequent trips to Western Germany, mostly to plead the city's case at Bonn, sometimes to meet with the Minister-Presidents of the eleven Western Länder (states), sometimes to confer with Socialist Party colleagues. Whenever time permitted, he traveled by car on the Autobahn through the Soviet zone, even though he was anathema to the Russians; he was determined to assert the Berliners' right of free access to their city.