Word: bonne
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Norbert Rissling, 25, is a conscientious objector to West Germany's military draft who opposes nuclear power and rearmament. He sits in a café in Bonn and probes the motivations underlying the discontent of young people. "We want what our parents have," he says with feeling, "and we don't see how to get it. Now it seems we will not be able to realize certain expectations, so we rebel against parents and against the state. 'They' say they rebuilt society and ask us how 'we' can dare to destroy what they built...
...Bonn, during one of the most high-strung sessions of the Bundestag since the 1950s, a young Social Democratic deputy stood before his vociferous parliamentary colleagues with tears streaming down his face. Why, he asked, was his party approving a $16.2 billion defense budget when millions of children around the world were starving to death every year? His emotive question was answered with shaken fists and shouted injunctions to sit down...
Perhaps the most startling scene of all occurred in Bonn, where some 200 members of the country's armed forces, the Bundeswehr, paraded through the streets to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the organization. Fully 6,000 police were on hand to protect the soldiers from civilian abuse. Similar public military displays are now being largely abandoned...
...authority begin to be openly challenged. His German Social Democratic Party (S.P.D.) was ousted from city hall in West Berlin in May. An amorphous left-wing coalition, including important members of his own party, is impugning some of Schmidt's most firmly held policies. Chief among them: Bonn's commitment to the 1979 NATO decision to deploy U.S. missiles to strengthen Europe's military security while at the same time seeking arms limitation through negotiations with Moscow...
...collection of symptoms. Chief among them is a growing fear of a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets and a conviction among the disaffected (which Moscow skillfully exploits) that the country is merely a pawn in the bellicose designs of the Reagan Administration. Says one senior Western diplomat based in Bonn: "It comes as a surprise at first, but a generation of West Germans who remember neither the war nor the cold war are perfectly capable of accepting Soviet statements at face value...