ree tear-gas grenades over the wall into the crowd on the street. The instant the grenades landed, two young men, one of whom had been idly standing with his arm around a girl, ran over, picked them up, and threw them back over the wall, where they exploded. This brought a tremendous roar of applause from the crowd, and further disconcerted the Vopos, who sent for reinforcements. Before long, two personnel carriers roared up beside the sound trucks, and soon the vacant lot and the street itself were alive with Vopos in battle gear, lying on their bellies with guns at the ready. The hooting and jeering of the West Berliners grew even louder. The troops were still deployed half an hour later, when, with the dinner hour approaching, the crowd began to drift away and Max and I also left. We were going in different directions, so I looked for a taxi, but didn’t find one until I had walked several blocks. Away from Wilhelmstrasse, I discovered, the voice of the commentator was loud and clear as he warned the citizens of West Berlin: “You live under the rule of capitalism in the middle of a sea of Socialist people. How do you expect to survive in the storm that is coming? We can find a way to help you.” On some street corners, small clusters of people were gathered, apparently listening to the harangue. On the sill of a second-floor window somebody had placed a radio, facing Wilhelmstrasse and playing jazz at full volume. Over the music produced by this gesture of defiance came the voice of the commentator, clear as a bell: “Citizens of West Berlin, your time is running out. You must realize there is only one solution for your trouble. You can achieve an honorable agreement with the workers and farmers of the German Democratic Republic and the fruitful rewards of peaceful coexistence. Citizens of West Berlin . . .”
That night, at dinner with the political editor of one of West Berlin’s newspapers, I mentioned the events of the afternoon on Wilhelmstrasse. “As you saw, West Berlin is at a disadvantage in the loudspeaker war,” he said. “We do not have equipment to compare with the East’s. One day this summer, when the atmospheric conditions were favorable for transmitting, their loudspeakers could be heard over half the city. Furthermore, a loudspeaker offensive is harder on West Berliners, because so many of them live right up against the wall. East Berliners, of course, have been evacuated for a considerable distance behind it. You heard their loudspeaker message once today. Well, then, you’ve heard it a thousand times. It’s always the same, and so is the purpose. They are just playing on our nerves. I don’t think they expect any immediate results from their propaganda. They believe they will get what they want if they wait. The loudspeaker offensive is to make us feel helpless. That is the object—to make us feel that nothing can be done, that we must just sit here and listen, and not be able to turn them off or do anything else about it.” I said that the West Berliners that I saw had seemed to respond to the offensive calmly enough, and remarked on the orderliness of the crowd on Wilhelmstrasse and the contrast between its behavior and the actions on the other side of the wall. We talked for a while about the way the West Berliners have reacted to the provocation of the wall, and the fact that, aside from the demonstrations following Peter Fechter’s death and the setting off of a few explosive charges at the wall, which caused inconsequential damage, they have created no incidents. “They are following the policy of the city government,” the editor said. “The West Berliners are told that they should be aware of the wall, they should not be content with it, but they should never attack it. This puts an unusual stress on the police, because they feel the same way everybody else does. They, too, have relatives and friends on the other side. But they have the responsibility of stopping any kind of activity against the wall, and they have done their job well.” The West Berliners’ obedience, I remarked, is praised by some people as a