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From their Berlin vantage point, the Western powers confront the interior of the Communist world with a visible example of freedom in action. From Berlin, Western powers draw back their most accurate intelligence of what is going on in Eastern Europe. More important, Berlin constitutes the Soviet empire's greatest escape hatch. Through West Berlin every day there still pass some 250 East Germans—not just the aged and infirm, but the ablest and most vigorous citizens of an East German satellite crucial to Moscow's economic and political plans.
Twice in eleven years, in its anxiety to strengthen their hold on Eastern Europe, Russia has sought to snuff out Berlin's liberty. By their refusal to panic, their stouthearted willingness to risk economic hardship rather than accept subjection, Berliners have won the world's admiration. Today, in the tower of Berlin's City Hall, hangs the "Freedom Bell"—a copy of Philadelphia's Liberty Bell, given to Berlin by the people of the U.S.
Small World. For the unforgiving, who cannot forget the Nazis' cruel conquests, there is savage irony in the fact that the Freedom Bell now rings out daily over the city that was the capital of Adolf Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich. But the Nazis never won a free election in Berlin, even failed to get a majority in the first municipal elections held there after Hitler came to power.
The Berliner's password is "Mir kann keener"—"Nobody can put anything over on me"—and his instinctive reaction to totalitarianism, as it is to anything highfalutin, is a deflating wisecrack. The airlift memorial at which last week's anniversary ceremonies began is universally known to Berliners as "the Hunger Claw"; a modernistic postwar church that looks as though a train might pull into it at any moment is called "Jesus Station." When Berliners use the high-flown expressions coined to describe their city's cold-war role—"the beacon of freedom" or "the show window of democracy"—there is always a sardonic edge to their voices.
The Berliners' own name for themselves is "die Insulaner"—the islanders. Implicit in the phrase is an awareness of living in a world that for all practical purposes has an area of only 186 square miles. (The unpredictability of the East German police, which discourages most West Berliners from venturing into "the Zone," bears particularly hard on warm summer weekends when the road to the city's one big public resort, the suburban lake of Wannsee, is jammed with virtually every car in Berlin.)