Halvorsen said, in one of his late interviews, that he had “without hope, the soul dies.” He attributed this idea to the children at the fence, though it has the quality of something he had spent decades thinking about and distilling. The candy drops, in this reading, were not primarily about candy. They were about the signal that someone was paying attention to you as a specific person in a specific city at a specific moment, and that this attention was worth flying across an ocean for.
Whether or not every detail of the encounter at the fence happened exactly as Halvorsen remembered it, that is what the letters suggest the children understood it to mean. And that is why the story has persisted for more than seventy-five years, through anniversaries and memorials and foundation work and congressional medals and schools named in Berlin: not because two sticks of gum were nutritionally significant, but because of what it meant to break them in half and pass them through the wire.
## The Significance of Tempelhof
The airport where all of this happened was not a neutral backdrop. Tempelhof Airport in 1948 was one of the most recognizable structures in Berlin, an enormous building that combined, in its architecture and history, some of the most difficult aspects of what Germany had been and what it was trying to become.
The terminal building at Tempelhof had been designed by Ernst Sagebiel and built in stages from 1936 through the war years. It was intended to be one of the grandest airport facilities in Europe, a physical expression of Nazi ambitions for air travel and German power. The building’s massive curved facade, its underground taxiways and hangar system, and its scale — it was for many years one of the largest buildings in the world by some measurements — made it unmistakable. American forces occupied and used the facility after the war ended, and the C-54s that flew the Berlin Airlift took off and landed at a building that had been built partly to celebrate a regime the United States had just defeated.