Honecker to Finally Make Visit to West

East German Communist leader Erich Honecker will come to West Germany in September, the first visit ever by an East German head of state, according to a joint announcement issued Wednesday in Bonn and East Berlin.

Honecker, 74, will make his official trip at the invitation of Chancellor Helmut Kohl and will visit his native state of Saarland in the western edge of the country on the border with France.

The visit has the approval of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, diplomatic sources said, and may be yet another reflection of the Soviet party chief’s policy of glasnost, or openness.

A previous visit to West Germany planned by Honecker for September, 1984, was canceled at the last minute, presumably because the Soviet leadership of then-party chief Konstantin U. Chernenko had a change of mind and decided against it. Since then, rumors have waxed and waned about a Honecker tour to West Germany, which he left in 1949 to become a Communist official in the east, succeeding to the party leadership in 1971.

Honecker wishes to make the trip, political observers say, because he wants to visit his old home and some relatives, including a sister, to give his regime prestige in the eyes of West Germans, and to establish a certain independence from Moscow.

His trip will undoubtedly attract the widest possible media coverage on both sides of the German border.

East Germany has the most successful economy in the Communist East Bloc, but diplomatic sources here say that Honecker does not see eye-to-eye with Gorbachev’s reformist policies and does not have any personal rapport with the Soviet leader, either.

Honecker will arrive Sept. 7 and visit Bonn, the Saarland, Karl Marx’s birthplace in the city of Trier, and Bavaria, where he is expected to be received by state Premier Franz Josef Strauss, a staunch conservative who has nonetheless recommended trade ties with East Germany for the sake of his state’s economy.

Though Kohl upset the East Germans during the West German national election campaign in January by charging that 2,000 East German political prisoners were held in “concentration camps,” both countries have tried to establish more cordial relations in recent months.

The two countries--the West, formally named the Federal Republic of Germany, with 60 million people, and the East, or German Democratic Republic, with 17 million--have been divided since 1945. They have been poignantly separated physically since the 1961 construction by East Germany of the Berlin Wall.

Since 1972 and the signing of an agreement between Bonn and East Berlin, both sides have had diplomatic relations and reciprocal establishments that amount to embassies in everything but name.

West Germany has extended to the Honecker regime economic credits worth billions of dollars, partly in exchange for East German relaxation of travel restrictions to the West, and for the release of political prisoners, enabling them to come to the west.

Just last week, Kohl reported that an estimated 2 million East Germans would visit his country this year, although most of them are retired pensioners allowed temporary exit visas.

The announcement of the Honecker trip came four days after West German President Richard von Weizsaecker completed a tour of the Soviet Union. Sources close to Weizsaecker’s office said that Gorbachev may accept an informal offer for him to visit West Germany within the next year, thereby paving the way for Kohl to go to Moscow.

Kohl has long wanted to make an official visit to the Soviet Union. However, he damaged his chances last year when, in an American magazine interview, he compared Gorbachev’s public relations prowess with that of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister.

Since then, the rift is thought to have been patched up, although Moscow still accuses the Kohl government of stalling nuclear arms control negotiations with the West.