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"Frau, Komm!" The city where Willy Brandt decided to stay was in 1948 still little better than a charnel house. A million of Berlin's prewar inhabitants were dead or had fled. With morbid ingenuity, a statistician calculated that the rubble in West Berlin alone would have sufficed to build 51 Cheops pyramids. And still vivid in the minds of every Berliner were the last nightmare days of the war, when Russian' troops raged through its streets with the dread cry, "Frau, komm!" (Woman, come!).
Yet even at its most despairing moments after World War II, Berlin never sank to the depths of self-pitying neuroticism and decadence that characterized post-World War I Berlin. Within weeks after Hitler's death in a Berlin bunker, Berliners were singing a defiant pop song called Berlin Will Rise Again.
Its words did not really begin to come true until the Berlin blockade. At first surprised when the Western Allies did not abandon them to the Russians, Berliners acquired new drive and hope from partnership with their conquerors. The U.S. itself, rudely made aware of Berlin's cold-war significance, began pouring aid funds into the city, totaling 39% of all U.S. postwar aid to Germany.
The Road to Istanbul. Sprawling like a grey barracks town across the sandy Brandenburg plain, Berlin was never even in its heyday apt to win any urban beauty prizes. The scars of war still remain. From the spanking new Berlin Hilton, the visitor looks out at acre upon acre of wasteland—the ruins of Berlin's former diplomatic quarter. West Berlin's biggest prewar railroad station is still a burnt-out shell. And even the vaunted Kurfürsten-damm, for all its movie palaces and glass-walled sidewalk cafes (with infra-red heating for winter), will not bear comparison with the fashionable shopping districts of Paris and London.
Nonetheless, West Berlin today is in throbbing good health. It is West Germany's biggest industrial city (electrical and construction equipment, pharmaceuticals and fashion), with production running at nearly $2 billion a year. Since 1950 West Berlin has built 150,000 new apartments—v. 25,000 for East Berlin—and enough new roads to stretch, strung together, all the way to Istanbul. Its film studios, one of which is located in a former poison-gas factory, are Germany's, biggest; its Free University (11,000 students)—built with U.S. aid as a substitute for Humboldt University, which lies in East Berlin—is second only to Munich's. And to compensate for its unrepaired ruins, West Berlin also has some of the world's most striking modern buildings, including the low-cost Hansa Quarter housing development, a pastel "city of tomorrow" designed .by some of the world's leading architects.
Even the threat of a new blockade has not halted Berlin's growth. Since Khrushchev's November ultimatum, the giant Siemens electrical company has announced an $8,400,000 expansion program. If need be, the city is prepared to live on its fat for quite a while. At a cost of more than $350 million, West Berlin has doubled its stocks of food, fuel and raw materials, now has at least a year's supply in its warehouses, from coal to frozen meat. Says a top city official: "If it comes, it will be a comfortable blockade this time. We have even got coffee and cigars."