EAST GERMANY: In from the Cold

For more than two decades East Germany was the pariah among nations, its huge foreign ministry building in East Berlin underused because only a dozen countries, all Communist, maintained full diplomatic relations with it. The West not only denied its existence as a nation but refused to call it the German Democratic Republic—its official name —insisting that it was nothing more than an extension of the Soviet Zone of Occupation. Then five years ago, Chancellor Willy Brandt relaxed Bonn's opposition to the East Berlin regime, and the G.D.R. began its long journey in from the cold. Nation after nation...