Gorbachev Takes Trip, Comes Down to Earth in Germany

For Mikhail S. Gorbachev, one of the 20th Century’s great figures, it was a comedown--a measure of just how far it is between powerful statesman and has-been.

Arriving Wednesday in Germany on his first foreign trip since leaving office last December, the man who more than any other precipitated the changes that swept communism from Europe, came as a simple citizen, the former leader of a former country that was once a superpower.

And he was hardly noticed.

There were no anthems, no honor guards. Indeed, there was not even a red carpet for Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, as they descended the steps of the helicopter that brought them from Frankfurt to the grounds of a large government guest house in the hills east of Bonn.

A couple of TV crews and a knot of mainly Russian reporters were on hand to watch Foreign Ministry functionaries meet him and guide him to his quarters.

During the course of his eight-day visit to the once-divided country he helped unite, the Gorbachevs are scheduled to meet many old friends, including Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his wife, Hannelore, who they dined with Wednesday evening, and former Social Democrat chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Willy Brandt.

The former Soviet president will also visit Munich, deliver a speech in Hamburg and give a press conference next week in the small town of Gutersloh.

“We Germans haven’t forgotten and won’t forget what he’s done for us,” Kohl said Wednesday evening after receiving Gorbachev at the federal chancellery in Bonn.

But if the German public has not forgotten, they were giving a fairly good impression of it. The grounds of the government guest house that Gorbachev occupied, usually under tight security during foreign visits, were open for public access on Wednesday, but hardly anyone bothered to turn up.

Only a couple of the country’s national newspapers even noted his impending trip. The conservative daily, Die Welt, got the date of Gorbachev’s arrival wrong in its editorial; Neues Deutschland, owned by the retooled Communist Party, carried nothing at all on his visit.

The mood was a far cry from the rapturous reception he received on his first visit to Bonn in June, 1989, when West Germans propelled Gorbymania to such a height that it raised concern in other Western capitals. Then, thousands of Germans stood outside the Bonn City Hall chanting, “Gorby! Gorby! Gorby!” The country went into a collective swoon, and the leading Soviet foreign policy specialist, Georgy A. Arbatov, crowed that “we are depriving our opponents of the enemy image.”