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OPINION
Page 4 Sunday, October 4, 1981 The Michigan Daily

Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan

Turmoil simmers Berlin

Vol. XCII, No. 22

420 Maynard St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Editorials represent a majority opinion of the Daily's Editorial Board


Keeping pay
A LTHOUGH University admini-
strators have felt safe in allowing
the real salaries of professors to be
eroded by inflation, the College of
Engineering has come to the
realization that this cannot continue.
In an effort to fight some of the
problems inherent in the University's
salary policies, the engineering college
has instituted a unique and promising
program to cushion the blow of budget
cutbacks on its own faculty's salaries.
Faced with the possibility of losing 25
to 30 professors this year due to
inadequate salaries, the college has
found a way to increase pay to its
assistant professors by an average of
25 percent.
By allocating the college's reserve
fund of alumni donations to salaries,
the engineering school will be able to
stay competitive in the job market-at
least temporarily.
By providing the entire University
with only a 5.5 percent pay hike this
year, the administration has stretched
the patience of faculty members for
adequate salary increases.
More and more faculty members
have been considering leaving Ann Ar-
bor for positions elsewhere; the
engineering school should be lauded
for its effort to prevent that migration.
Although the college's salary plan
has some built-in inequities, at least
somewhere on campus administrators
are beginning ti wake up to the very
real danger of losing valuable instruc-

competitive
tors.
The raises under the engineering
program will be based on the
"marketability''of a professor's
talent; it is the professors who publish
and do distinguished research who are
the most sought after by higher paying
schools and private institutions.
As aresult, some of the best teachers
in the engineering college may not
receive the largest pay increases
because they have spent more time in
the classroom.
Nevertheless, the school's plan
represents a prudent step toward
alleviating a potentially very serious
problem. By maintaining salaries at
competitive levels, the engineering
college is acting to retain its most
desirable professors and preserve the
quality of education it provides.
Meanwhile, however, the remainder
of the University faculty is still left
with the 5.5 percent pay increase.
Last month, the Regents jumped the
gun in approving a University budget
that predicted a $6 million cut in state
appropriations. Now that the
legislature has approved a $4 million
dollar reduction instead, perhaps the
administration should look at the
possibility of investing that $2 million
reprieve into a revised salary
program.
Otherwise, the entire University
may suffer the sort of deterioration
that the engineering college is trying to
avoid.

By Jon Stewart
WEST BERLIN - As West
Berliners observed the 20th an-
niversary of the wall last month,
it was clear that this city's inter-
nal divisions have come to out-
weigh the concrete interface of
capitalism and communism that
separates East from West. This
week's renewed, violent riots
over squatter's rights is only one
more warning that the social
fabric here is threadbare.
West Berlin is a city divided
against itself, torn in radically
different directions by recent
demographic changes which
have left the city largely in the
hands of nearly a half-million
retirees, almost a quarter-million
marginally employed foreign
workers (mainly Turkish), and a
rising percentage of underem-
ployed young West Germans
seeking to establisha complete
alternative society.
WHILE THE YOUTH turn
toward an untested and risky
humanist anarchy, the elderly
long for the stability and order of
the past, and the foreigners pur-
sue their own alternatives, which
include Third World communism
and Islamic fundamentalism.tIt
is as if President Reagan, the
Ayatollah Khomeini and the old
Abbie Hoffman were stranded on
an island together.
In recent months, the constant
tug of opposing forces in this
island of contradictions has
produced a startling collision of
cultural metaphors. On onehand,
West berliners and others have
been flocking in droves to a film
called "We Children of the Zoo
Station," also known as
"Christiane F."
Based on a book which is a best
seller and is required reading in
many West German high schools,
it tells the story of a 14-year-old
West Berlin girl, an angel of the
demimonde, whose decent into
the seedy, grimy hell of West
Berlin's young drug and
prostitution culture is portrayed
in shocking and vivid detail.
THE BOOK and film - shot in
the spaced-out, underground
corridors and filthy public
toilet stalls of the city's central
(Zoo) train station, where the
young addicts congregate-has
jolted adult West Germans into a
shocked recognition of their
country's (and especially
Berlin's) hard drug problem, the
worst in Western Europe.
But many West German youth
have reacted in a very different
way. Christiane F., the confused
and angry heroine of the story,
also has become a major cult
film, imitated and idolized by
thousands of youngsters who still
flock to West Berlin to pay
homage to her hangouts-the Zoo
Station and a discoteque, which
have become perverse shrines to
a rootless generation that has
rejected the status quo Toy
syringes have shown up in
schools, and the bedraggled,
zombielike look of heroin addicts
has become fashionable.

Russian soldiers standing before the Brandenberg Gate which

Igthe unemployed

AS THE SECOND day under the
Reagan budget drew to a close
last week, statistics told the nation's
unemployed that their ranks were
swelling, particularly among
minorities. More than 16 percent of the
nation's black population is out of
work. More people than ever before
are accepting part-time work to help
offsetktheir growing debts.
Of course, such figures cannot be at-
tributed to the effects of Reagan's
budget just yet. But the irony of the
unemployment rate rising just as
Reagan succeeds in slashing millions
from social programs must not be
overlooked.
As Reagan's plan takes affect, we
are all being told to patiently withstand
the period of slight financial hardship
that may be in store for us in the next
few months. Every citizen must do his
part, we are told, for our country to get
back on the right economic track.
But what Reagan and his followers
fail to realize is that it will be the
lower-income groups and unemployed
who will pay most dearly for this tran-
sition. Even some economists won't
venture to guess how Reaganomics
will hit these groups without the sup-

port of social programs which are still
staggering from the program's
careless financial surgery.
The callous attitude of the Reagan
administration toward the increasing
hardships of the nation's growing
number of unemployed cannot be
ignored. Among the social programs
hardest hit was the Comprehensive
Employment Training Act, which
provided job training and placement
assistance to thousands of under-
privileged citizens.
Even as Reagan touts his program
as potentially creating some 13 million
new jobs, we cannot help but wonder
how many jobs his plan will
eliminate-how much suffering will
ensue-before any of the promised
benefits might be reaped.
It is unjust that one sector of the
population should have to suffer the
great majority of the nation's growing
pains, into a promised new era. The
Reagan administration will have to
face the fact of unemployment very
soon for its program to have any
possibility of success. The plight of
minorities and youth, the groups har-
dest hit by unemployment, cannot be
ignored for long.

divides East from West Berlin.
At the same time, West
Berliners also are confined
everywhere in this city by an
amazing revival of Prussian
history and culture, in the form of
dozens of new books, TV specials,
large exhibitions, concerts and
film festivals. It is the first time
the Germans have seriously con-
fronted their Prussian heritage
since the state of Prussia was
formally abolished in 1947 by the
Allied Control Commission,
which declared that "the
Prussian state has been an em-
bodiment of militarism and
political reaction;"
NOW, HAVING produced a
generation that knows little or
nothing of Nazi guilt, Berlin-the
old capital of Prussia-has tur-
ned back to the forbidden past for
a sense of its historical roots and
national identity.
In West Berlin, the most im-
pressive manifestation is a
historical exhibit at the old Arts
and Crafts Museum, which has
been refurbished for the occasion
at a cost of some $20 million.
Called "Prussia-An Attempt at
a Balance," the exhibit of photos,
documents, costumes and in-
dustrial artifacts focuses a non-
judgmental light on those
peculiar attributes which made
Prussia both great and mon-
strous: the obsession with duty,
allegiance to state and military
authority, rigid discipline,
respect for law, and even a top-
down liberalism and paternalism
that provided the foundation for
European social democracy.
They all are attributes notably
lacking in West German youth
today.
Some West German observers
view the Prussian blitz as an ex-

pression of a latent desire for a
return to such virtues; others, as
a mere curiosity about an almost
forgotten past.
WHICHEVER l' correct, the
final message of the exhibit
requires little explanation. After
wandering through dozens of
rooms, the viewer enters the final
exhibit, a room.dedicated to the
nadir (or culmination) of the
Prussian experience, the Nazi
era. Quotes from Hitler and
others extolling the Prussian past
adorn the walls, and two sym-
bolic < coffins offer silent
testimony to the 6 million Jews
killed in concentration camps
and 50 million other was
casualties.
Finally, behind a discreet cur-
tain, a window opens to reveal a
mountain of rubble topped by the
wing of a World War II British
bomber. It is what remains of the
Nazis' SS torture chambers. The
ugly, gray Berlin wall runs hard
behind it. It is the final legacy of
Prussia.
Christiane F. and the Prussians
share West Berlin today, and
more than a wall divided them.
Like the Turkish guest workers
crowded close by the Berlin wall
in the ghetto neighborhoods of
Kreuzberg and Schoenberg,
living within their own
languages, religions, and
pollitics, they are isolated from
one another by their fundamental
aspirations.
THE YOUNG people who find a
model in Christiane F., for in-
stance, are part of a larger youth
phenomenon here which has
erected its own doggedly anti-
dogmatic and militantly anti-
militarist alternative
society-the very antithesis of

Prussian values.
Already, the youthful society
has created what amounts to an
alternative infrastructure to ser-
vice it: schools, nurseries, health
clinics, cafes, book shops,
political organizations, even a
financial lending institution that
provides low- or no-interest
capital for various alternative-
type projects.
Because of a severe housing
shortage, they have occupied,
some 170 old office buildings,
apartmentdcomplexes and
warehouses long abandoned and
neglected by their owners (often
the city itself). Until a new
conservative government was
voted in the spring, largely in
reaction to the squatters, they
were tolerated.
NOW A NEW hard-line policy
on evistions by conservative
Mayor Richard vonWeizsacker is
resulting in an even more
militant assortment of ecologists,
feminists, pacifists,.communists,
social reformers, and even
apolitical street people.
Their "Alternative List" is a
party which refuses to call itself a
party. Yet it recently captured
nine seats in West Berlin's
parliament-enough to constitute
a swing vote of considerable
power between the long-ruling
Social Democratic Party and the
newly elected Christian
Democratic government.
"We want a human politics, one
that is made in the streets around
everyday problems, and that is
not possible within the
framework of the traditional par-
ties," declared an AL activist in
an interview. Eventually, he and
others suggested, they will
inherit the city without having to
form coalitions with anyone.
WHILE THE youth and their
conservative elders clash in
parliament and on the streets, the
foreign workers remain almost
invisible outside their own neigh-
borhoods. But their politics, too,
are in upheaval, mirroring the
unsettled nature of politics in
Turkey. Torn between the far
right and far left, between com-
munism and Islam, the Turkish
community is almost totally ab-
sorbed in a Byzantine web of
secret societies and outlawed
parties.
But through the internecine
Third World battles of the guest
worker ghettos would seem to
have little to do with the future of
West Berlin, the opposite may be
true. The older generation of law-
respecting, order-loving West
Germans will slowly pass away
or leave.
The youth movement will
either build a new society or fiz-
zle. And in the, meantime, one of
every three babies born in West
Berlin has foreign parents, most
of them Turkish.
Stewart wrote this article for
Pacific News Service.


LETTERS TO THE DAILY:
Duarte regime cannot be reformed



Ip


T'AN IlAN
KEF'ULICA N
PA PT

I

1981

I

Your editorial of September 26,
"Toward Salvadoran Reform,"
promotes the illusion that the
civil war in El Salvador can be
ended by U.S.' pressure to
"reform" the Duarte junta. This
deadly illusion is shared not only
by the liberal imperialist
politicians of the Democratic
Party, but also by the
Democratic Revolutionary Front
(FDR) of El Salvador, which
calls for a "negotiated set-
tlement" with the junta.
But the Duarte junta cannot be
reformed. Liberation for the
Salvadoran workers and peasan-
ts will only come when the
military junta which has ruled
the country for 50 years is
smashed and when the land
owned by the capitalist "14
families" is taken over by the

Posterman, the same man behind
the brutal Phoenix Project in
Vietnam, which led to the deaths
of 30,000 "Vietcong suspects." And
we all know what the U.S. did in
Vietnam.
The Spartacus Youth League
supports the military victory of
the leftsist insurgents in El
Salvador. As long as the
Salvadoran military, which
massacred 30,000 peasants put-
ting down an uprising in 1932,
remains intact, the blood of the
Salvadoran workers and peasan-
ts will continue to flow. No U.S.
backed "reform" or FDR
"negotiated settlement" will
destroy the military junta.
The leftist rebels must defeat
the junta on the battlefield to put
an end to Duarte's reign of terror.
This victory can open up the road

bureaucracy, and we condemn
them for not giving the
Salvadoran insurgents sufficient
military aid.
Stop all U.S. aid to the mur-
derous junta!
Military victory to the leftist

insurgents!
Defense of the USSR and Cuba
begins in El Salvador!
-Leon Bell
Spartacus Youth League
October 1, 1981

CRISP perfect-almost

To the Daily:
Computer Registration In-
volving Student Participation is a
well thought out, almost flawless
operation.
It's very important that credit
be given where credit is due (no
pun intended). In light of this, I
commend and applaud to the en-
tire CRISP operation and to all
those involved in making
registration flow with such grace.

drop/add forms at Angell Hall
and not at CRISP. This is my
fourth year (eighth opportunity
to experience CRISP) and since
my freshman year, I have seen
frustrated students truck back to
Angell Hall for one measly
drop/add slip-usually in the
rain.
Perhaps the convenience of
having drop/add forms available
at CRSIP has been overlooked?

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