A Simple Signpost

On the other side of the world from Hanoi, Soviet jets also sped across the skies. Only 500 feet above the rooftops of West Berlin whooshed dozens of supersonic MIGs. They fired salvos of blanks from their cannon, shattered the sound barrier once every seven minutes, shook windows, walls, nerves and eardrums all over town.

The "Ivans" dived lowest over West Berlin's sleek Congress Hall, nicknamed "the pregnant oyster," where West Germany's Bundestag was sitting in a one-day symbolic session. With the acquiescence of the three Western allies that still retain occupation rights in the city, the session had been convened--in defiance of Soviet wishes--to reaffirm West Germany's determination that Berlin will one day be the capital of a reunited Germany.

Petulant Performance. As a reprisal against the proceedings, the Red air circus was a petulant and ineffectual performance. So was its counterpart on the ground, where the Communists tied up traffic for nine days on the autobahns linking West Berlin with West Germany. Civilian and allied military cars were stalled in lines up to 15 miles long, as the Communists pretended to hold military "exercises" in the area. As soon as the Bundestag session was over, the Reds stopped their harassing flights and ended the exercises.

To a world preoccupied with newer conflicts, the sound and fury serves as an apt reminder that one older problem remains unsolved. Two decades after World War II, Germany is still divided. Its onetime capital languishes as an occupied enclave. Whatever the legalisms involved, it seemed somehow strange that a sovereign West Germany actually had to ask the U.S., Great Britain and France for permission for its legislature to sit in West Berlin.

There was a time in the 1950s when the problem of divided Germany was on everyone's lips. Today it is seldom discussed. France and Britain seem uninterested, and in the U.S. there is equal indifference. One reason perhaps is the recent vogue for anti-Nazi popular culture. The thud of jackboots across the bestseller lists (Armageddon, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich), the screen (Judgment at Nuremberg, The Longest Day) and the stage (The Deputy, Incident at Vichy) tends to make many Americans think of Germany in terms of its bloody past.

New Generation. Fact is, 55% of West Germany's population today were under 25 years of age on V-E day, and the new generation hardly feels responsible for the sins of its elders. What does concern Germans of all ages is an increasing desire to assert a national identity, hardly a novel emotion. Polls show that reunification is a burning question for a majority of West Germans. Obviously, the lack of real nationhood could give the spark of opportunity to precisely the kind of German ultranationalism that the world learned to dread in two world wars.

Chancellor Ludwig Erhard--so often criticized as the Gummiloewe (rubber lion)--this time correctly judged that bringing the Bundestag to meet in West Berlin was a simple and reasonable way not only to express his countrymen's wishes, but also to show that the Soviets were as unwilling as the West to stir up another Berlin crisis. To the West Germans, the Berlin exercise was a signpost to the future, and the hollow Communist response suggested that perhaps other Western leaders could think about taking the initiative a little more often.

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