Indeed, the first impression you get is that both city and people are dying of a decline. The people, like their houses, are dirty and dingy; everywhere crippled beggars and ruined or unroofed buildings show the direct effects of war. Clothes are threadbare, faces thin. Stalwart, straight-backed Americans, warmly clothed and well fed, stand out like solid shapes among shadows. As they stride through the streets you expect to see them pass through these grey, drifting figures as through ghosts.
Yet there is life still in Berlin, for men must be alive who can face death for a cause, whether it be for law or for liberty. But you must go further afield to find it than Unter den Linden where are haunting only ghosts of the past. We are hunting the genius of the future.
We shall be out all day on this hunt, and had better breakfast on bully beef and biscuit--a present from American friends--for black bread and substitutes are no foundation for a long walk; and of the vast transportation system of underground and overhead trains, electric trams, motor-buses, and taxis that used to carry over three million passengers daily, little indeed is now left. Moreover the wretched remains are to-day tied up by the general strike and street fighting. And so, avoiding the streets where sniping is in progress or barb-wire barricades threaten a search for arms and inspection for passes, we come to the General Assembly of Berlin Councils--that for the moment alone retains political control of the situation, since the Government took military command of it by the severest form of martial law and the general use of machine-guns.
Here we find a large music hall which before the war was a typical scene of flamboyant Berlin night-life. On this grey winter's morning it is crammed full of grimly earnest men--the delegates. On the stage is the Executive Council. The chairman the Independent, Richard Müller, is of the pastor or professor type--his colleague Däumig a heavily built, grey-haired man, might be an English engineer or merchant captain. On the left of the hall are the Communists, in the middle the Independents, and on the right the Social-Democrats, with a little knot of Democrats--the two latter parties supporters of the Government and opposers of the strike--but in a minority here. The business before the Assembly is the filling of the vacancies on the Executive Council left by the Communists who seceded from it when it declared the strike off, and the appointing of delegates to the National Congress of Councils which is to meet next month. But the Communists intend to force a discussion of the Government's policy as to the street fighting which is still going on at Lichtenberg, and the chairman has to concede this.