Capital German Question Becomes a Tale of 2 Cities : Unity: Berliner describes Bonn as ‘a trustee who’s decided not to return something to its rightful owner.’

These should be heady times for Berlin.

Its existence as a Cold War flash point has ended, much of the 100-mile wall that divided the city between East and West has disappeared and experts predict that once the federal government returns, the city’s population of 3.3 million could quickly double, making the city the most important power center between Washington and Moscow.

Only one problem stands in the way of Berlin’s rosy-looking future: Bonn.

The much-maligned town on the banks of the Rhine that was selected over Frankfurt 41 years ago as the provisional West German capital, in part because it was thought it could never replace Berlin as the home of an all-German government, is running hard to do just that.

“It’s like a trustee who’s decided not to return something to its rightful owner,” groused Berlin city government spokesman Werner Kolhoff.

To be sure, Berlin’s role as the designated capital of a united Germany was written into the treaty of unification last August.

However, the critical question of whether the government should relocate to Berlin or stay in Bonn, a move that would leave Berlin as a ceremonial capital, has mushroomed into one of the most controversial and important decisions facing the new Germany.

The issue has already triggered a rare, genuine national debate in a unification process that has moved so quickly that real differences have been simply overwhelmed. It dominates dinner-table conversations, eats up office time and is the focus of endless German television talk shows and opinion polls.

When Europe’s largest circulation daily newspaper Bild Zeitung recently asked its readers to vote on the choice, just over 70% of the 95,000 respondents chose Berlin. However, a scientific poll conducted by the Allensbach Institute indicated national opinion far more evenly split, with 42% for Bonn, 40% for Berlin and the balance still undecided.

The debate has also raised larger questions relating to a newly united Germany’s search for a national image, an identity and its link both to history and to the future.

Should the new Germany be seen as modest and withdrawn, or representative and in touch? Should it be governed face to face with the reminders of its troubled past or in the reassuring setting of its post-World War II democratic success? Should Germany’s leaders sit in the heart of Europe, 50 miles from the Polish border, or farther west, nearer the epicenter of the European Community.

“The choice of capital will say a lot about the new Germany,” summed up the respected British magazine, The Economist.

The choice will also influence the shape and direction of Germany’s future development, because Bonn and Berlin stand in sharp contrast.

Bonn--quiet, safe, content, some might say smug--lies in the heart of the affluent Rhine-Ruhr region. Its foreign residents are mainly well-heeled diplomats, its diversions notoriously meager. Half the size of a Chicago cemetery and twice as dead, the saying goes.

“The best thing about Bonn,” joked the late Bavarian political leader Franz-Josef Strauss, “is the train to Munich.”

Yet many Germans have come to see advantages in this dullness.

They see Bonn’s modest image as a potential asset in easing foreigners’ worries about German might, its sleepiness as a counterbalance to heated political debate and its size as an insurance policy against any over-centralization of power.

“The argument that this great new Germany can’t have a small capital is not only false but dangerous,” said Bonn’s mayor, Hans Daniels.

Berliners mount equally compelling arguments for their city, a world class metropolis that has energy, sprawl and diversity, with more than 60 museums, about 6,000 restaurants and an array of subcultures that ooze discontent.

In all of Germany, Berlin is also the only city that Germans from both east and west can call home. Here the challenges and problems of unity are most visible.

Berlin may have been the capital of the ill-fated Weimar Republic, of Hitler’s Third Reich and a Communist East German dictatorship, but it was also where a peaceful revolution breached the Berlin Wall last November. Its will to survive as part of the West was so strong at the height of the Cold War that President John F. Kennedy declared himself one of their own with his famous remark, “ Ich bin ein Berliner .”

“Berlin stands for very democratic traditions,” said former West Berlin Mayor Walter Momper, who governs the city today jointly with his former East Berlin counterpart, Tino Schwierzina.

Momper answers Berlin critics who say it is unseemly for a new German government to rule amid the relics of a Nazi past such as Hitler’s bunker and Hermann Goering’s Air Ministry building.

“It’s better to govern face to face with such monuments because then it is impossible to forget the lessons of history,” he said.

For Bonn, Berlin and the regions surrounding them, the stakes involved in the decision are enormous.

In Bonn, a university town one-tenth the size of Berlin, local officials claim that a move would be catastrophic.

“Half the population would be hit,” said Mayor Daniels during an interview.

Berliners paint the issue in similarly dramatic terms.

They note that with Germany’s post-World War II division, Berlin gradually lost everything except the will to survive.

Of the city’s current $16-billion annual budget, just over half comes directly from the federal treasury.

In some respects, unity has only exacerbated Berlin’s problems.

Conditions are especially acute in the eastern part of the city, which until unification was the capital of East Germany. Berlin’s other mayor, former East Berlin Mayor Schwierzina, said in an interview that 34 ministries and 11 state authorities have already closed down with the demise of East Germany.

Key industries struggling with Western competition are on the brink of bankruptcy, he said. Roughly 400,000 jobs have been affected, he said.

“If the capital doesn’t come here, there’s no short-term possibility of employing these people,” Schwierzina said.

Berlin officials maintain that investment will come to their city and the struggling surrounding regions only if the government returns.

“If we lose the government, industry won’t come, and if we lose both, then what’s left is a city on welfare,” spokesman Kolhoff said.

With the stakes high, both cities engage in a battle that often falls short of friendliness.

Playing to a public already worried about the costs of unity, proponents of Bonn have issued estimates as high as $65 billion for the move to Berlin. Berlin counters that it can be done for $4 billion. The truth is, nobody knows.

A plan that Momper present his city’s case personally to the people of Bonn at a festival there last month was called off because the subject was considered too emotionally charged, while the editor of Bonn’s leading daily newspaper, General Anzeiger, departed recently amid reports he drove a car with Berlin license plates and was lukewarm about the paper’s campaign to keep the government in Bonn.

The German penchant for putting down deep roots has also generated a powerful coalition of interests made up of civil servants, Parliament members and news media staffers who have lived much of their lives in the Bonn area and have little interest in moving to Berlin.

Berlin also has influence, starting with the clearly stated personal preference of two former mayors, German President Richard von Weizsaecker and former Chancellor Willy Brandt.

Although far too divisive an issue to be written into a party campaign platform, Chancellor Helmut Kohl is also known to personally favor Berlin.

Pending a decision, the government has suspended plans to build a large new federal press bureau in Bonn; Spain has halted work on a new embassy in Bonn, and the United States waits to see what to do with the acre and a bit it owns just east of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate where its pre-World War II embassy stood.

“It could be the most valuable piece of land in Central Europe,” said U.S. Embassy administrative officer Harry Geisel.

While early opinion polls showed clear public sentiment in favor of Berlin, more recent surveys have indicated that opinion is almost evenly divided.

In the end, however, the decision will come from the all-German Parliament, the lower house of which will not be elected until Dec. 2.

The decision is expected early in the new parliamentary term. Some of those involved in the battle predict a compromise solution, in which both cities would have some ministries. Whatever the outcome, they say, it is likely to be determined more by regional power politics than lofty principle.

Kolhoff noted that when the temporary capital was being chosen back in 1949, “between Bonn and Frankfurt the vote was very close” (Bonn won by a four-vote margin, 33-29) “and there was lots of horse-trading going on. It will be the same here.”