East-West Homecoming for a Serious Boy

People around Neunkirchen, the Saarland coal-mining town where Erich Honecker was born 75 years ago, remember him as a serious-minded boy who passed out political newspapers after school at age ten and shunned religion class as a matter of working-class principle. "He didn't play with us in recess or go swimming in the summer," recalls Kurt Humbs, 76, a classmate in nearby Wiebelskirchen, where Honecker grew up. "Sometimes," he adds, "you had the impression you were looking into a mirror with no glass in it."

Humbs and his neighbors will have another chance to look into the mirror next week. Fifty-two years after he left Neunkirchen, now part of West Germany, and twelve years after he became the bland but politically nimble leader of Communist East Germany, Honecker is scheduled to make a five-day visit to his homeland. His host will be West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and a lot more than nostalgia will be in the air. Postponed earlier as a result of tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the trip will mark the first time an East German party leader has set foot in West Germany, and only the second time since the two countries were created nearly 40 years ago that leaders of both have met face-to-face on German soil.

Honecker's visit repays a trip made to East Germany by then Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in 1981. The East German leader's plans for a reciprocal visit fell victim to a freeze in superpower relations in 1984, after West Germany had decided to deploy U.S. cruise and Pershing II missiles and the Soviets, in response, had walked out of arms negotiations in Geneva. Criticized in the Soviet press for planning to carry out his trip despite Bonn's move, Honecker dutifully canceled at the last minute. His arrival in West Germany now is one more sign of how U.S.-Soviet relations have improved.

The trip also underscores the change in intra-German relations. For years the two states were bitter cold war enemies, unable to reach even a basic agreement recognizing each other's de facto national existence until 1972. Today, while still separated by an 863-mile border bristling with armed patrols and barbed wire, the two states have settled into a wary but increasingly pragmatic relationship, held together by more than 70 bilateral agreements governing everything from postal communications to electricity sharing. "German-German relations used to be much worse than East-West relations in general," says Wolfgang Berner, deputy director of Cologne's Federal Institute for East European and International Studies. "This has changed." While no small part of that change is due to West German bridge building, Honecker has in recent years also grown more flexible.