Reaching Out

The two Germanys nurture ties

Ingrid Berg was no ordinary East German, and she did not flee the country like one. With her husband, mother-in-law and two children, 3 and 7, Berg drove the family Volvo to Czechoslovakia, the only foreign country that East Germans can visit without an exit permit. In Prague they headed for the West German embassy, claimed refuge and demanded asylum in the Federal Republic. Then Berg revealed her identity: she was, she said, the niece of East German Premier Willi Stoph, the second most important man in the Communist hierarchy.

The East German government quickly declared that Stoph "had nothing to do with the actions" of the Berg family. Western publicity concerning the defection, said the official East German press agency, was an attempt to poison relations between the two Germanys. Officials in Bonn were equally disturbed by the attention the West German press gave the Berg incident. In an effort to avoid further embarrassing the East Germans, the government of Chancellor Helmut Kohl briefly suspended any pronouncements on the matter. After spending six days in the Prague embassy, the Berg family returned late last week to East Germany. It was generally understood that they had received guarantees of an exemption from prosecution and of eventual permission to leave for the West.

As the Berg case illustrates, the nurturing of ties between the two Germanys has become an increasingly important preoccupation on both sides of the border at a time when relations between Washington and Moscow have worsened. East Germany has sharply hiked the number of exit permits, to about 3,000 monthly, that it allows to citizens who desire to move to the West. In return, Bonn has taken the unusual step of warning East

Germans against seeking asylum in West German diplomatic missions. Another East German gesture was a quiet decision to begin dismantling some of the automatic firing devices aimed at preventing escapes along the border. East Germany has turned control of Berlin's entire surface rapid-transit system over to West Berlin. On the eve of Soviet Leader Yuri Andropov's funeral in Moscow last month, Chancellor Kohl asked East German President Erich Honecker to dinner and reissued a longstanding invitation to him to visit West Germany.

Accompanying the small but significant accommodations are the stirrings of a diffuse kind of nationalism. One sign of such interest: for the past five months a book titled Where Germany Lies, written by Guenter Gaus, 53, who served from 1974 to 1981 as West Germany's first diplomatic representative to East Germany, has been on the West German bestseller list. The attraction of Gaus' memoir seems to be its openly nostalgic quest for a lost sense of German national identity within the economically less advanced East. "People in the East kept what West Germans surrendered," Gaus says. "The power to persevere grew over there, while it evaporated quickly here." Confronted with the relative backwardness of smalltown East German life, Gaus muses, "How much more German."

Gaus, now a television interviewer, goes on to suggest that younger Germans should imitate the merchants of the 19th century, who helped unite Germany by using trade to break down territorial barriers. Similarly, he says, peace movements on both sides of the border could "perhaps revive the national identity of Germans."

While most reviewers dismissed these suggestions as woolly-headed, the fact that the two Germanys are trying to protect their relations at a time of superpower tension is evidence that, ideology aside, the destinies of the two countries are inextricably Linked.