Bonn Publisher Lifts Quotes on DDR

West Germany’s largest publishing chain today ended a practice that has irked authorities in East Germany for 40 years--placing quotation marks around every reference to West Germany’s socialist sibling state.

The quotation marks have cost Axel Springer newspapers and magazines journalistic accreditation in East Germany and readership among much of West Germany’s left-leaning populace.

Referring to East Germany as “DDR,” the German abbreviation for Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic), was the protest of the publishing chain’s founder, Axel Springer, who died nearly four years ago.

Germany’s division after World War II weighed heavily on Springer, who moved his prospering business from his native Hamburg to West Berlin in 1967.

After construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, he put up a lighted reader board to flash news from the West across the barrier.

“The hope for reunification is unshaken,” Manfred Schell, editor in chief of the conservative daily Die Welt, wrote today.

But, in the light of changes in East-West relations, the barriers to improving the flow of information between the political blocs must fall, Schell added.

The giant Springer publishing network includes Europe’s largest-circulation daily, Hamburg-based Bild Zeitung, which sells nearly 5 million copies daily. It also includes the influential Berliner Morgenpost and Bonn’s Die Welt.

Circulation of Springer’s main dailies has fallen as much as 10% in the last few years, and many attribute the drop to shifts within the West German populace toward detente with nations of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.