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first grade and the guide said, "these kids have a lot of homework and study to do". Question and conclusion: Have you seen any American first and second graders carrying briefcases of books home? What will be the effect of such concentrated early starting education in 20 years relative to American standards? Put that fact together with my com- ments about national pride of building the nation and of buying and reading so many books and what does it say? To me it is very obvious that America had better do something and fast or we shall find our- selves very much the worse in comparison a few years hence.

We drove through the city into the center to a brand new big hotel for lunch. The Karl Marx Allee or main drag is a very wide street lined with tall buildings with large plazas and open space between them, quite a number of cars on the streets and everything seemed to be buzzing. It was something of a surprise after all that one reads over here about the comparisons with W. Berlin. Compared with other cities than W. Berlin which is, after all a kind of a special case, E. Berlin struck me as being very much a going concern. Our guide, a woman, revealed quite a bit of anti-Russian bias in her comments about the late Stalinesque architecture of some of the first constructed government buildings and about the colossal Red Army Memorial park which the Russians built but the Germans have to pay to maintain. The city was, of course, leveled by the bombing so they had a chance to redesign it when it was rebuilt and they have a lot of parks, wide streets, new buildings, etc. We approached "The Wall" from the East side at the Brandenburg Gate (which is in W. Berlin actually) and lots of tourists from other Socialist countries were viewing it too. There isn't enough space to go into it here, but I was able to sense a considerable difference in the attitude concerning both the necessity for and function of the wall between people living on both sides of it. And of course it breaks down into the point of view of the needs of the society vs. the rights of the individual and both are valid. We saw the low mound of grass covered earth which was the remains of Hitler's last Bunker and then approached Check Point Charlie from the East. This was quite a ceremony. They collected our passports on the bus and took them to the sentry house to check them, a man came through the bus and looked at each of us and ques- tioned some and inspected some of the hand luggage our suitcases had been sent over direct from the airport. A man with a big mirror on a pole went alongside the bus with the mirror under it to be sure that no one was "riding the rods" under the bus as a means of escape. Eventually we got our passports back and were allowed to proceed. At the W. German side all they did was to wave us through. We then pro- ceeded to the Berlin Hilton.

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