Word: wehner
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...Wehner, 60, is a powerful and puritanical figure in the coalition government that took office last month. He has never run for election and has never before accepted a government office of any kind, preferring always to remain in the background. Until recently, he operated out of an office so small that he could fit in only one visitor at a time. For the past eight years, however, he has been deputy chairman-and the organizational brains-of Willy Brandt's Social Democratic Party...
...Wehner who in 1959 rammed through the Socialists' far-reaching "Bad Godesberg Plan," which swept Marx aside, renounced class warfare and came out in favor of progressive capitalism. It was he who worked out the details of the coalition government with the Christian Democrats, then talked rebellious party members into accepting it. It was he also who conceived the series of television debates, scheduled to begin this year, that would have been the first public political dialogue between East and West Germany-if Ulbricht had not stepped in at the last minute to overrule Communist participation...
...Peer. Wehner holds a special terror for the Pankow regime: before the war, he was in the top echelon of the German Communist Party. He was Ulbricht's pal and peer, gave orders to many of the men who now make up East Germany's coterie of bosses. Arrested in Sweden in 1941, he renounced Communism from his jail cell and was expelled from the party. Ever since, his former comrades have regarded him as a traitor and a menace. Twice their gunmen have tried to kill him, and his appointment as All-German Affairs Minister brought bitter...
Despite the complaints from the other side, Wehner believes he can make progress toward bringing the two Germanys closer together. He plans to offer easy credit to encourage "inner-German trade," hopes eventually to set up a formal economic federation. To soothe Eastern feelings a bit, he has already ended Bonn's long insistence on referring to Ulbricht's realm only as "Soviet-occupied Germany"; the new official euphemism, calculated to be less offensive, is simply "the other Germany...
...Wehner has also scrapped one of the primary articles of faith of all previous Bonn governments: that West Germany will never, under any circumstances, recognize the Pankow Communists. He would be happy to establish relations with East Germany, Wehner allowed last week, under one condition: that "the present regime" hold "free and secret elections" to prove that it represents the 17 million people it rules. Communist states being what they are, that day is anything but imminent...