International: Rebirth of a City

Seven years ago, French, British and U.S. troops occupied West Germany as conquerors. They stayed on as policemen, then as judges and bureaucrats. Last week they became comrades-in-arms of the vanquished—pledged to defend Germany from deadlier occupiers.

The seven years have been told in headlines: from Hermann Goring cheating his judges at Nürnberg by swallowing potassium cyanide, to airlift planes shuttling to blockaded Berlin, to the meeting in Bonn of Germany's first democratic Parliament since 1933. The deeper occupation story is the slow rebirth of a nation in thousands of German towns. Typical of these is Pforzheim (prewar pop. 80,000), a...