Diplomacy: Fatigue at the Top

West German Chancellor Willy Brandt has had less than three months to apply his Ostpolitik, so it is hardly surprising that he has not yet achieved any significant relaxation of tensions in Central Europe. Last week, in fact, Moscow stiffened its attitude toward Bonn by endorsing Walter Ulbricht's demand for full diplomatic recognition of East Germany. One effect of Brandt's initiatives toward the East, however, has been all too apparent: the exhaustion of ranking West German diplomats.

Besieged by requests for talks from Russia, Poland, East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and involved in Common Market negotiations as well, the West German Foreign Office is staggering under the work load. The pressure is especially heavy on the top five or six officials. These are the decision makers who must at once oversee contacts with the East Bloc and reassure Bonn's Western allies that nothing is being given away to the Communists.

Easy Victim. Consider State Secretary Georg-Ferdinand Duckwitz, 65, who coordinates diplomatic policy toward the East Bloc. After weeks of wolfing down lunch at his desk and rushing from conference to conference, Duckwitz had to be sent home for a complete rest. A few days later, Foreign Minister Walter Scheel, 50, was rushed to a Bavarian sanatorium and ordered to read nothing for several days. Other top West German diplomats show symptoms of severe strain and exhaustion. Even Chancellor Brandt, who possesses an exceptionally rugged constitution, became exhausted from poring over diplomatic dispatches and consulting with foreign policy advisers. He fell victim to the flu epidemic that is sweeping Europe (see MEDICINE), spent a few days in bed, then flew to Tunisia for a two-week vacation.

One effect of the upper-echelon exhaustion has been to prompt Bonn to ask the Czechoslovaks to hold off for a while on their formal requests for talks. Since preliminary talks with the Poles are expected to begin in Warsaw later this month and Bonn may also start new probes with East Germany, Brandt simply does not want to have too many negotiations going at the same time.

Suspected Plot. Some Western diplomats suspect that the Communists are flooding Bonn with requests for talks in hopes of overwhelming, and possibly outsmarting, weary West German negotiators. The only trouble with the hypothesis is that the Soviet Union is working its own top men pretty hard as well.

Last month, for example, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko personally received Bonn's ambassador in Moscow for preliminary talks about full-scale negotiations. Many diplomats took Gromyko's presence to mean that the Kremlin had suddenly decided to put a new emphasis on relations with West Germany. That may yet prove to be the case, but it is also true that Gromyko was the only seasoned senior negotiator available in Moscow at the time. First Deputy Foreign Minister Vasily Kuznetsov, who ordinarily handles Western European affairs, was preoccupied with negotiations with Peking, where he returned last week after a two-week recess in Moscow. Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Semyonov is engaged in the SALT negotiations, which after a successful five-week preliminary round in Helsinki will reopen in Vienna on April 16.