bag, she darted out of the room. The officials began collecting their papers. That day’s processing was finished.
Driving back from Marienfelde, Max stopped at a traffic light next to a pair of blue Volkswagen station wagons, each with six loudspeaker horns on its roof and each bearing on its side, above a drawing of a length of barbed wire, the words “Studio am Stacheldraht” (“Studio at the Barbed Wire”). Max said that the station wagons were part of a mobile fleet that RIAS—Radio in the American Sector—had set up after August 13th to broadcast into East Berlin from right beside the wall. He added that the sessions were sometimes rather lively affairs, and asked if I would like us to follow the unit ahead. I said yes, and as we started off, Max explained that while it is not actually against the law in East Germany to tune in on Western television or radio broadcasts, a tremendous campaign is constantly being waged to discourage the practice on a “voluntary” basis. “The press raves that only spies and traitors listen to RIAS,” Max said. “Schoolchildren sign pledges that they won’t watch or listen to Western broadcasts. Teachers ask innocent-sounding questions to trick the youngsters into informing on their parents. The regime lets groups of the Jugend roam the roofs of East Berlin apartment houses and tear down every television antenna that looks as if it might be set to receive Western stations.” Soon after SAS got started, Max added, the East Germans retaliated on a large scale, ringing the city with hundreds of loudspeakers attached to utility poles along both the wall and the zonal border, and putting mobile transmitting units of their own into action. As a result, the two sides are now engaged in what Berliners call the Loudspeaker War. As we got within half a mile or so of the wall, it became clear that that day’s battle was already under way, for march music from East Berlin began to fill the air, becoming louder and louder as we followed the SAS station wagons to their destination, which turned out to be near a section of the wall just around the corner from Wilhelmstrasse, and Max parked behind them. We walked over to Wilhelmstrasse, a broad thoroughfare that comes to an abrupt dead end at the wall. The street was full of people—perhaps two hundred and fifty on foot and at least a hundred in small cars and on motorcycles, scooters, and bicycles. In a few minutes, the march music stopped, and a few seconds later an equally jarring voice came on. “Citizens of West Berlin,” it began, and as it went on, I was struck by the constant repetition of the words “Vest Bear-leen.” Almost at once, the cars that had swarmed into the street and the surrounding area began sounding their horns. The racket was remarkable, and, in the immediate vicinity, drowned out the voice of the commentator. On one side of Wilhelmstrasse is a vacant lot covered with rubble that rises considerably higher than the wall. Standing on this rubble mountain, dozens of West Berliners added to the din by whistling through their fingers, hooting, and catcalling. The demonstration had an impromptu air. People on their way home from work—it was now about a quarter after five—stopped and joined in. “You see,” Max shouted in my ear, “we don’t need any jamming devices!” We climbed up on the rubble mountain to have a look at the other side. Three sound trucks the size of moving vans were parked alongside one another in the middle of the street, about half a block beyond the wall. “They’ve brought up their biggest guns tonight!” Max shouted. “Our transmitters can’t compete with that stuff.” Standing at one side of the trucks were half a dozen Vopo officers, two of them using binoculars. Beside a vacant lot a few feet away, three steel-helmeted Vopos were lying on the ground, their submachine guns pointed toward the wall. Elsewhere in the vacant lot I eventually made out three other Vopos, similarly equipped and positioned, who were partly concealed by weeds and rubble. Directly across the wall from where I stood is the East German House of Ministries, a great