Special Delivery in Berlin

A 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.

In the 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.

Tough & Unbending. Under the Christian Democratic governments of Chancellors Adenauer and Erhard, letters from East Germany were not even opened. As a price for joining "the Grand Coalition," the Social Democratic Party insisted on a conciliatory foreign policy that aimed not only at working for German reunification but also at improving relations with the entire Soviet bloc. Bonn has recently offered East Germany the prospect of more trade, large development loans and official talks at the sub-Cabinet level about easing travel and communications restrictions that now exist between the two countries. But it has not found the East German regime at all receptive. In fact, Willi Stoph recently replied to an earlier Kiesinger letter with a return missive demanding that Bonn renounce its "addiction" to neo-Nazism and militarism, abolish the capitalist system and spin off West Berlin as an independent "free city."

East Germany has also tried to block Bonn's overtures to Eastern European countries, has continued to attack the Federal Republic publicly and has generally acted the way Communist Boss Walter Ulbricht looks: tough and unbending. It is even using Martin Luther to exacerbate relations with West Germany. It has limited to a meager 100 the number of West German clergymen who may come to this month's ceremonies at Wittenberg commemorating the 450th anniversary of the posting of the 95 Theses. Those who do get in must affirm that they oppose Bonn's "revanchist policies." East Germany is also trying to transform Luther into a precursor of Communism: a new, authorized biography states that he started "class warfare" in Germany and more or less laid the ground for Communism--even though, concedes the author, Luther "was in no way aware of this."

Rival Cliques. In West Germany, the Social Democrats are becoming painfully aware that the intransigence of East Germany and its East-bloc allies is the main cause of tension within the Grand Coalition. Kiesinger is under increasing pressure from the right-wingers of his own party not to go so far in seeking to deal with the East. Herbert Wehner, the chief Socialist tactician, and Socialist Foreign Minister Willy Brandt insist that the government must keep on trying even in the face of continued negative responses.

If East Germany rebuffs Kiesinger's newest gesture, the Socialists will be hurt, since rapprochement with the East is just about their only issue that Kiesinger has not entirely usurped. Their policy has already caused the party to split into rival cliques in the traditional Socialist stronghold of West Berlin. A far-left group wants West Berlin to become a neutral "bridge" between East and West, while others maintain that West Berlin must remain committed to the West for protection. Caught in between the two factions, Mayor Heinrich Albertz, 52, who was Brandt's successor, last week found himself so isolated that he resigned. Alarmed by the disarray in Berlin, Brandt sent in as a replacement his No. 2 man in the Foreign Ministry. He is Klaus Schiuetz, 41, a native Berliner who, as a student in 1948, helped found the Free University in West Berlin in protest against dictatorial Communist policies at the old Berlin University in the city's East sector. He seemed well-suited to talk some reason into the heads of West Berlin's cold-war-weary Socialists.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.