Berlin: Where Rivalry of East, West Soars

WEST BERLIN—Nothing symbolizes the rivalry between the Communist world and the Western democracies more dramatically than the divided city of Berlin.

What happens on either side of the Berlin Wall that cuts through the once proud capital tells much about the competing systems and the love-hate relationship between democratic West Germany and Communist East Germany.

After 35 years of separate development, how do the lives of the nearly 2 million people of West Berlin and the 1 million plus residents of East Berlin compare in terms of prosperity, economic security and political freedom? The magazine's Robert Haeger visited the two Berlins deep inside East Germany, talked with officials and citizens, then filed this report.

On the surface, this Western enclave inside East Germany is busy and energetic. In fact, it is an economic disaster area with a plummeting population and disappearing jobs.

West Berlin's apparent prosperity is a veneer, applied and paid for by the taxpayers of West Germany at a cost of billions of dollars each year to maintain the city as a beacon of democracy for fellow Germans in the East. It is an expensive proposition.

Keeping West Berlin going last year cost West Germany 13 billion marks – close to 6 billion dollars or about 16 million dollars a day. That is more than one third of Bonn's defense budget.

Legally, West Berlin still is occupied territory. West Germany, in the name of ''occupation costs,'' will pay 490 million dollars this year to support the 25,000 American, British and French soldiers and government civilians, plus their dependents, who live here. The force has its own post exchanges and commissaries and contributes very little to the city's overall economy.

Dwindling population. West Berlin does have freedom. It also has problems not readily apparent when a visitor views the bustling though tawdry Kurfurstendamm, center of the city's tourist trade, or the gray and scarred old Reichstag building, once the parliament of a united Germany.

The city is shrinking, with many Berliners leaving for greener pastures.

Officially, West Berlin's population has fallen from 2.2 million persons to fewer than 1.9 million since Communists built the Berlin Wall in mid-1961. In reality, more than half a million Germans have left the city.

Part of the population loss is being filled by arriving foreigners. Twenty years ago, hardly any non-Germans lived here. Now, there are 230,000, half of them Turks who have taken over much of the shabbiest district in the city and made it a near ghetto.

Presence of the foreigners sometimes creates trouble. In mid-June, police clashed with a mob of West Berliners, including Turks, who were protesting anti-Turkish activities of a neo-Nazi group called Conservative Action.

West Berlin holds little promise for thousands of restless young Germans who remain here. Says a recent university graduate: ''This West Berlin is a great place to get an education, but not to use it. If you want into high-tech industry – that's my training – you have to go to the West. So I've gotten a job in Munich.''

An unidentified East German stands in front of a bulletin board advertising jobs all over West Germany in the Nibelungenhalle in Passau, Sept. 12, 1989.

One factor in what some experts see as the ''de-Germanizing'' process is the elderly population and its high death rate. One fourth of West Berlin's residents are 65 or older, far above West Germany's national average. Local-government officials argue that the population decline is not really as serious as in some other European cities. But elsewhere people move to suburbs. This encircled city, 100 miles from West Germany, has no suburbs.

The loss of industry and commerce here also helps to explain the exodus. When the Wall went up, the city had almost 300,000 industrial jobs. Today, the number is 160,000 and dropping.

The city has tried to lure new job-creating enterprises from West Germany and elsewhere. Equipped with a 2.5-million-dollar budget, the Berlin Economic Development Corporation was able to promote about 8,500 jobs in three years. But in that same period, 50,000 other jobs were being wiped out.

The official forecast is for an additional 17,000 jobs to be lost in 1983.

Local and national governments, therefore, have become the city's main source of employment. At latest count, 1 in 4 of West Berlin's workers was on some form of government payroll.

But government work does not produce income, and West Germany must pay the bulk of West Berlin's bills.

Kept city. To date, Bonn has pumped more than 50 billion dollars into West Berlin, even though the city technically is a postwar protectorate of the Western Allies and not a constituent part of the country. That makes West Berlin perhaps the most heavily subsidized city in the world.

Beyond supporting the city government, West Germany underwrites West Berlin in other ways by providing tax concessions to firms and individuals and extending bargain-rate loans and outright grants to entice new business.

Says a local-government worker: ''You may question whether it's appropriate to subsidize three symphony orchestras and 12 theaters in this way. But it's just that sort of thing that makes Berlin what it is and keeps tourists coming. People in Bonn accept this.''

How long will the money faucet remain open? Indefinitely. Bonn has not given the slightest hint of turning miserly. In fact, officials talk about doing more, not less, for West Berlin.

An East German worker lays some of the first stone blocks of the Berlin Wall in August 1961.

After he became Chancellor last fall, Helmut Kohl summoned top industrialists to a conference that proposed 17 new projects to assist West Berlin. More-definite plans will be unveiled when the group meets again later this year. But West Berliners wonder if the scheme is not just another expensive dream.

Says one businessman: ''We've lived through this sort of thing before – big hopes and plans, and not much result. All one can do is hope that it really will be better this time.''

Bonn already pays handsomely to promote West Berlin as a conference center and tourist attraction. For 20 years, it has underwritten 18 percent of the cost of air fare to the city from other parts of West Germany.

With Bonn's financial aid, a string of new hotels were built recently to accommodate people attending Berlin conventions. Some 400 million dollars were poured into a conference center capable of holding dozens of meetings with thousands of participants.

The new hotels operate near capacity at times. Yet dozens of rooms often can be reserved without difficulty. Says a professional in the tourist business: ''Even if that conference center were filled 100 percent of the time, it could never pay for itself.''

Still, Bonn hardly seems to despair of paying West Berlin's bills. Perhaps as good an explanation as any comes not from a government official, but from a chauffeur who works in this Communist-surrounded city: ''Every time I visit my relatives in East Berlin, I find out all over again why West Berlin has to survive, no matter what it costs. As long as we are here, they can still hope that someday they will be able to live the way we do and have the things we have.''