Word: bonnes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...That, admittedly, is a remote prospect-but. say optimists, "What goes up must come down." There are, of course, the fatalists who suggest that Ulbricht's Wall will probably last as long as Hadrian's (1,835 years and going strong)-if only because, as one old Bonn hand put it last week, ''No democratic government could ever ask its people to try and tear that thing down...
...lost all its workers who lived in East Berlin, the electrical industry-which accounts for 30% of West Berlin output-has hardly skipped a beat since the Wall went up just one year ago. Of course some of West Berlin's stimulus is artificial: tax concessions from the Bonn government and wage levels that are lower than in West Germany even make it profitable to barge raw steel into the city from the West, shape it into beams, then ship it back. Berlin's cigarette, liquor and food-processing industries also prosper with the help of tax concessions...
Ghanaian ambassador makes his rounds in Bonn, and sputtered: "Yesterday they didn't even wear shoes, and today they come to town in big cars and fancy clothes bought with our money, and ask us for more." Germany's tightfisted Finance Minister Heinz Starke objects that "vast sums of money have been wasted," vigorously presses for less government spending abroad, and more tax inducements to pump private capital abroad...
West Germany still has far to go before its publicly financed foreign aid program equals $775 million, which would match the 1% of Bonn's gross national product that many international economists consider a proper figure. Actual government aid last year totaled $540,500,000, although the Germans claim a far higher figure by including such items as private investment abroad by German firms, reparations payments to Israel...
Even though West German generosity is below par by U.S. standards, Washington hopes that Bonn's aid program will not founder in the spate of criticism. But the Germans have much to learn. As one Bonn foreign aid official puts it: "Because we lost our colonies early, we come to Africa and Asia with 'clean hands.' But that also has disadvantages. We don't know them or understand them...