(The author, a Graduate Editor of the CRIMSON, was in Europe last year on a Fulbright Grant and spent several weeks in the Internationalen Hochschul Ferienkursut in West Berlin.)

"Einsteigen Einsteigen!" The dumpy little woman waved her green stick, the doors closed, and the elevated rain pulled out of Bahnhof Zoo.

I glanced up from my copy of the Kurier, to se the ruins of the Reichstag far to the right. Two more stops to East Berlin. It was about time to get rid of the paper: I had been warned that being seen with a West Berlin newspaper across the border could mean at least a night in jail. So I stuffed the sheets deep under the wooden bench.

You are now in the Democratic Sector of Greater Berlin," a harsh female voice boomed from the loudspeaker in the station. The scene outside was no different from the pat of West Berlin just behind--miles of pock-market buildings and gaping spaces or rubble--except that the heavy traffic was gone, and here long blue signs hung from the upper stories of many structures, proclaiming in three-foot letters:

A Newspaper and on Enigma

"Berlin Youth votes No to be was policies of the EDC!"

"Down with Adenauer and Churchill!"

"Peace and Friendship with the Great Peoples of the Soviet Union!"

The train approached Friedrichstrasse, once the home of Goering's Luftwaffe, and I walked to the door.

"Pardon me, Mcine Herr, but you have forgotten you paper."

I turned my head slowly, trying to appear nonplussed. "Your newspaper, Mcinc Herr, but you have forgotten it:" a short, poorly dressed man stood at my elbow. "No.. no, I'm finished with it, completely,"

"Ah, then I shall take it with me."

The doors had not yet opened, and I stood there until be came back, expressionless now, with my newspaper folded into a neat packet, which he had tucked under his right armpit. Finally, the door opened. It let him go first and moved down to the other end of the platform waiting until be had disappeared into a crowd of workmen and Peoples' Police.

My acquaintance of the elevated train was one more enigma in the skein of enigma that is Berlin. Berlin offers a kind of excitement to be found nowhere else in Europe. Here, the individual is suppressed by the ruin, the streams of propaganda from both sides, and by the constant awareness that he is sitting on a powder keg.

Berlin, a city of 340 square miles and 3,500,000 people, is an island. But the world has not passed it by. Instead, the forces and philosophies and fears that bat each other about the world, converge on this one spot.