Bridging the German Divide

...Every time a West German politician travels to East Germany, the regime's legitimacy in the eyes of its population goes up...

...The larger question, as bothKohl and Strauss seem to have recognized and evidently hope to convey to their counterparts in East Berlin, is whether relations between the Germanies can be maintained at all as East-West hostilities flare up once again...

...Not only would the loans come without any political conditions attached, but the East Germans evidently were to be left free to dispose of the new funds in any manner they wished...

...But the West Germans, inadvertently or not, got enmeshed in the process as well...

...Of late, no one has proved himself more skilled at manipulating this situation than Honecker, who has repeatedly shown the West Germans both the limits of their power in this contest and the ability of his own government to realize many of its chief aims...

...Kohl's latest bank credit, therefore, is not merely a generous gift...

...Often forgotten, too, is East Berlin's reliance on the West in a psychological sense...

...And now we learn that Strauss returned to the West carrying a secret note from Honecker outlining his intentions to step up certain aspects of inter-German ties, including the sale of political prisoners to Bonn, the upgrading of cultural exchanges, and the rebuilding of common roads...

...When Strauss arrived in East Germany in July he not only met with Honecker, but the two leaders' handshake was emblazoned across the pages of the Party daily, NeuesDeutsch-land, for all to see...

...each visit is evidence that the Communist government is taken seriously by its opponents, which has clearly not been the case for most of the GDR'sexistence...

...Their gestures read like concerted, if not also desperate, efforts to remind Honecker of what can be gained from continuing good relations between the two states and, conversely, what can be lost through an overly harsh reaction to the nato missiles...

...a past contributor to these pages, is Assistant Professor of Government at Hamilton College...

...The answer is to be found in the central issue now facing both Germanies-the impending, and at this point apparently inevitable, deployment of U.S...

...At the same time West Germany, once in an infinitely stronger position than East Germany, became dependent on its adversary's goodwill for maintaining favorable ties...

...Then, in July, Bavaria's outspoken Right-wing Prime Minister, Franz Josef Strauss, made an even more startling journey to East Germany...

...To account for the striking transformation among West German conservatives, however, it is not enough to assume that the likes of Kohl and Strauss simply changed their views overnight...

...It is as if past political reality has been swiftly overturned...

...When Bonn responded by trying to make the repeal of the higher exchange rates a precondition for the extension of the special interest-free, overdraft credit that governs inter-German trade (the so-called swing credit), East Berlin stubbornly held its ground...

...IN A TIME OF TENSION Bridging the German Divide BY A. JAMES McAdams Adecade ago no one could have foreseen the developments that transpired this past summer between East and West Germany...

...This began with detente's inception in the late 1960s, and has just become fully apparent with the re-escalation of East-West tensions in the 1980s...

...The introduction of the weapons into West Germany next December will offer East Berlin an excellent pretext for cutting back on its contacts with Bonn...

...Many of Kohl's and Strauss' critics are demanding immediate proof of Hon-ecker's readiness to reciprocate West Germany's friendly gestures...

...Indeed, most observers would have regarded them as quite implausible...

...It was originally thought that detente would afford Bonn a new kind of leverage by enmeshing the GDR in a web of constraining political and economic commitments...

...Honecker and his overseer, Soviet Party chief Yuri V. Andropov, have in fact hinted at such a turn of events in recent months, even as the GDR leader has simultaneously professed his intention to preserve the present amicable atmosphere...

...Over the decades, East Berlin has unquestionably grown dependent upon the West for a host of economic goods and services...

...it is a tacit assurance to Honecker and his cohorts of the good things that might still come their way so long as the proper perspective is maintained on the future of inter-German ties...

...In October 1980, for example, at the height of the Polish crisis, he drastically raised the amounts of foreign currency that Westerners were required to exchange before entering his country, with the consequence that the number of visitors dropped precipitously in the following months...

...In late June, Chancellor Helmut Kohl's conservative Christian Democratic Party/Free Democratic Party coalition government took Germany watchers by surprise with the announcement that it was ready to guarantee $397 million in private loans to East Berlin...

...For the first time on a regular basis, detente gave them a much desired avenue to the reunification of long-separated families, to substantial increases in communications, and above all, to the opening of routine contacts among citizens of the divided nation...

...A. James McAdams...

...Perhaps the East Germans will soon respond with a marginal lowering of the border exchange rates, or possibly by permitting a few more of their citizens the precious right of travel to the "golden West...

...In the end, the East Germans successfully negotiated a new swing balance while making only relatively minor humanitarian concessions...

...But given the ominous prospect of a new ice-age in relations with the East, he apparently feels some contacts with the other German state may be better than practically none at all...

...But details are really beside the point...

...Although the Communist leadership could of course manage to survive without encounters of that kind, they are useful byproducts of the current state of affairs that would quickly go by the wayside in any new freeze between the two Germanies...

...In this context, Kohl and Strauss* initiatives emerge as something more than isolated additional attempts to improve the inter-German climate...

...He was received by throngs of well-wishers throughout the country, and was granted a private exchange of views with Communist Party chief Erich Hon-ecker...

...The sh oncomings of Bonn's modern Ostpolilik notwithstanding, there are several ways West Germany can exercise leverage on East Germany...

...Since the West Germans have not been very effective in the past as negotiators, one may well wonder why Kohl and Strauss are displaying a new-found eagerness to pursue further conciliatory lines of dialogue with the East...

...Strauss himself, one of the staunchest opponents of this policy of appeasement and "change through rapprochement," was routinely denounced in theGerman Democratic Republic (GDR) as the West's greatest cold warrior, provocateur and militarist...

...For years, West German conservatives unrelentingly criticized the detente-minded Ostpoli-tik of their Social Democratic predecessors, arguing that attempts to purchase improvements in East German living standards and to increase the opportunities for personal contacts between the citizens of the two Germanies were largely in vain...

...What has really happened-and what both figures are responding to-Is a subtle yet fundamental shift in the nature of relations between the two German states...

...Certainly, a man of Strauss' temperament could not have welcomed the idea of warming up to those in the East German Politburo whom he has spent his whole life attacking...

...And now that the GDR's foreign debt has risen to almost $ 13 billion dollars (with correspondingly dangerous increases in service charges), its leaders may find that Bonn alone holds the key to avoiding a painful debt rescheduling...

...medium-range missiles in Europe...