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Hothouse Flower. In his ultimatum last November, Nikita Khrushchev proposed a neat solution to his troubles in East Germany: make West Berlin a "free city" totally divorced from Allied or West German control. As Khrushchev was well aware, his plan would ultimately spell West Berlin's ruin simply by ending its economic and financial integration with West Germany. (Politically, the city has never been legally integrated into the Federal Republic because that would be a violation of the wartime agreements with Moscow on which the U.S., Britain and France base their right to maintain occupation troops in West Berlin.)
West Berlin's flourishing economy is a hothouse flower. It is nourished not only by direct U.S. aid, but also by innumerable subsidies from Bonn. Its personal and corporate income taxes are 20% lower than those in the rest of West Germany; Its businessmen do not pay the 4% tax on all transactions that other West German businessmen do. The Bonn government equalizes freight charges on steel shipments to Berlin, and in effect gives businessmen free insurance on all shipments to and from the city. And for eight long years all West Germans except Berliners had to paste an extra "Berlin Contribution" stamp on every letter they mailed; so unpopular was this measure—it always made the change come out uneven—that in one West German city a Mercedes limousine bearing West Berlin plates was vengefully plastered from stem to stern with Berlin Contribution stamps. (Yet 14 million Brandenburg Gate lapel pins have recently been sold in West Germany as a sign of German unity.)
For several years past, West Berlin's leaders have worried over the tendency of its young people to seek careers in West Germany proper. Already more than half West Berlin's population is over 45, and an abnormally large group—16%—is over 65. The hothouse flower needs constant tending.
The Consequence. In the first weeks after Khrushchev's alternative, it was Willy Brandt as much as any man who set the pattern of Western reaction. What Khrushchev intended to do, said Brandt, was to establish "a concentration camp on the installment plan." As for Soviet talk of Berlin as a threat to peace: "This so-called crisis is an artificial product of Soviet policy . . . Berlin is neither a cancer nor a soft spot." Later, in a flying visit around the world, Brandt helped to keep public attention focused on Berlin's plight, hammered away at the proposition that "Berlin is not a cause but a consequence"—a consequence of the division of Germany.
This was the crux of the position that the Western powers took at Geneva last week. It was also a position that Nikita Khrushchev ("No one really wants German reunification—no one") clearly refused to accept. Yet nothing short of reunification of Germany in freedom could possibly justify the withdrawal of Western occupation forces from Berlin. However much the oratory at Geneva might becloud the issue, Berlin's cold-eyed citizens were keenly aware of these realities. "We'll do well not to expect too much from the Geneva conference," Brandt told his Berliners last week. "It's better to be pleasantly surprised."