Germany: Special Delivery in Berlin

A trim, athletic-looking man, dressed entirely in grey, stepped from a West Berlin taxi near a checkpoint at Heinrich-Heine-Strasse. He beckoned to an East German border guard, exchanged a few words with him, and then hurried across the border into East Berlin. The man was not a defector or a spy. He was a high-ranking West German official who carried in his black briefcase an important letter from West German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger to Premier Willi Stoph of East Germany.

In the letter, Kiesinger offered to have his state secretary, the country's highest-ranking civil servant, open talks with East German authorities in either Bonn or Berlin. "Polemics lead us no where," said Kiesinger. "We are convinced that the sole sovereign, the German people, wishes to live in one state. This national will controls our actions." The letter was West Germany's first proposal for high-level talks with the East and thus one of the most radical changes in German policy wrought by the ten-month-old coalition of West Germany's two dominant parties.

Tough & Unbending. Under the Christian Democratic governments of Chancellors Adenauer and Erhard, letters from East Germany were not even opened. As a price for joining "the Grand Coalition," the Social Democratic Party insisted on a conciliatory foreign policy that aimed not only at working for German reunification but also at improving relations with the entire Soviet bloc. Bonn has recently offered East Germany the prospect of more trade, large development loans and official talks at the sub-Cabinet level about easing travel and communications restrictions that now exist between the two countries. But it has not found the East German regime at all receptive. In fact, Willi Stoph recently replied to an earlier Kiesinger letter with a return missive demanding that Bonn renounce its "addiction" to neo-Nazism and militarism, abolish the capitalist system and spin off West Berlin as an independent "free city."

East Germany has also tried to block Bonn's overtures to Eastern European countries, has continued to attack the Federal Republic publicly and has generally acted the way Communist Boss Walter Ulbricht looks: tough and unbending. It is even using Martin Luther to exacerbate relations with West Germany. It has limited to a meager 100 the number of West German clergymen who may come to this month's ceremonies at Wittenberg commemorating the 450th anniversary of the posting of the 95 Theses. Those who do get in must affirm that they oppose Bonn's "revanchist policies." East Germany is also trying to transform Luther into a precursor of Communism: a new, authorized biography states that he started "class warfare" in Germany and more or less laid the ground for Communism—even though, concedes the author, Luther "was in no way aware of this."