Word: german
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...trim, athletic-looking man, dressed entirely in grey, stepped from a West Berlin taxi near a checkpoint at Heinrich-Heine-Strasse. He beckoned to an East German border guard, exchanged a few words with him, and then hurried across the border into East Berlin. The man was not a defector or a spy. He was a high-ranking West German official who carried in his black briefcase an important letter from West German Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger to Premier Willi Stoph of East Germany...
...letter, Kiesinger offered to have his state secretary, the country's highest-ranking civil servant, open talks with East German authorities in either Bonn or Berlin. "Polemics lead us no where," said Kiesinger. "We are convinced that the sole sovereign, the German people, wishes to live in one state. This national will controls our actions." The letter was West Germany's first proposal for high-level talks with the East and thus one of the most radical changes in German policy wrought by the ten-month-old coalition of West Germany's two dominant parties...
When they packed up their displays at the end of this month's Leipzig trade fair, most East German companies found themselves with virtually empty order books. One state-owned company had an altogether different problem. The famed Meissen chinaworks, which was the hit of the show, wound up with six months' worth of new business. The company's popularity was so striking that its managers were already finding it embarrassing; the "People's Own Plant, State China Manufactory, Meissen" had been running far behind in filling orders even before the trade fair began...
...Meissen accounts for only 4% of the output, its high prices make it by far the best hard-currency earner of the lot. Since few of its wares are sold in other Iron Curtain countries-"They need their money now for other projects," is the explanation of one East German official-Meissen's eyes are fixed on the West...
Died. Hans-Christoph Seebohm, 64, longtime (1949-66) West German Transport Minister; of a lung clot; in Bonn. As a public servant, Seebohm swiftly rebuilt and expanded Germany's war-ravaged railroads, autobahns, ports and waterways. As a politician, he was signally less successful. His incessant clamor for the return of the Sudeten-land-yielded to Hitler in 1938 and handed back to Czechoslovakia in 1945 -was a constant embarrassment to the Bonn government...