Word: bonneli
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...soon as ordinary people from Dresden and Potsdam, wearing tennis shoes and loaded with plastic bags and perambulators, were seen hobbling through the underbrush across the Hungarian border in the fall of 1989, crowding embassies in Warsaw and trains in Prague, there were raised eyebrows and mixed feelings in Bonn and elsewhere. For there is nothing dearer to the heart of responsible statesmen than stability. Yalta may have had certain drawbacks, but it was an arrangement one had learned to live with -- and in the end any situation seemed acceptable as long as it was "under control...
...nervous fiddling in Bonn was nothing compared with the havoc wrought in East Berlin. In hindsight it is clear that the fall of the Berlin Wall was due not to strategic planning, but to a sudden loss of nerve. A single ambiguous sentence uttered at a press conference, a mere slip of the tongue, was enough to start an avalanche. The unification of Germany was set off not by grand design but by a blunder...
Passed in 1956 at the behest of the powerful West German trade unions, the closing law has resisted almost every effort to liberalize it. Last year Bonn managed to push through an optional extension of business hours on most Thursday nights, to 8:30 p.m. For weeks afterward, people went around saying it would cost Helmut Kohl the next national election -- and, who knows, they may be right...
...area had a long tradition of smaller, specialized industrial companies before the command economy crushed them. It was only in 1972 that a final wave of nationalization swept the last 12,000 firms into state conglomerates. About half of them have already demanded to be reprivatized. Officials in Bonn and Berlin hope the spark of entrepreneurial talent can be rekindled with loans from European Recovery Program funds. Demand is high. An initial allocation of $3.5 billion has already been handed out, and a replenishment of the pot is planned...
...amount of direct aid that West German taxpayers will have to pay out to prop up the East's economy. Figures as high as $60 billion a year over the next few years have been mooted; the DIW economic forecasting institute in West Berlin expects $30 billion annually. Bonn has already put together a war chest of about $70 billion for & eventualities. Among other things, Bonn inherits a large G.D.R. budget deficit and foreign currency debt of around $13 billion. At the same time, the special aid to West Berlin that West Germany provided, some $12 billion a year...