Word: pentabonn
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When he was overruled, Schröder carried his fight from the Defense Ministry, newly housed in a gleaming complex above the Rhine that has inevitably been nicknamed the Pentabonn, into the public arena. He leaked to the press that the cuts would mean a reduction of 60,000 men in the German army. The calculation was his own and not necessarily accurate, since the reductions could be taken in equipment as well as men. Still, the ensuing headlines brought the desired result. Washington, irritated that Kiesinger had not informed it in advance of the budget reduction...
...Pentabonn. As a result, government ministries are strung miles apart in makeshift, inadequate buildings that range from a pre-empted hotel, where each office has a private bath, to a converted Wehrmacht barracks. Embassies are scattered from Cologne, 18 miles north of Bonn, to Rolandseck, ten miles south in the neighboring state of Rhineland Palatinate, where the Russians have taken over an old resort hotel. Chilean diplomats must work above the din of a five-and-dime store on the floor be low; the small, ugly British chancellery is smack in the middle of a cornfield, across the street from...
...government grew, great, boxlike buildings have risen to house the Parliament and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Defense Ministry is starting to build an eleven-story headquarters on the outskirts, so massive that German newspapers call it "the Pentabonn." But even here the provisional fiction was preserved -all new buildings were so designed that they could be converted to other uses, e.g., the Bundestag building is to be turned into a teachers' college, the Defense Ministry into a hospital...
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