No Wanderer

His eyes puffy from lack of sleep, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt last week delivered his first state-of-the-nation address to the Bundestag. Just back from a two-week vacation in Tunisia, Brandt had taken one look at his aides' drafts of the speech a few days earlier and scrapped them all. They made him appear too pliable to Eastern European demands. The evening before his Bundestag appearance, he stayed up until nearly midnight honing and polishing a new version of his first major policy statement since last October's inaugural address.

The October speech, with its enunciation of his Ostpolitik, had touched off a flurry of diplomatic activity between Bonn and its Communist neighbors. Since then, Brandt had said little. So this time he felt it necessary to deal exclusively with foreign policy, for he is determined to break the enduring impasse in Central Europe. Most of the speech was directed at East Germany's spade-bearded Boss Walter Ulbricht, who fears that any improvement in Bonn's relations with Warsaw and Moscow will undermine his own bargaining position with West Germany. Last month Ulbricht sent Brandt a proposed treaty between the two Germanys that was peppered with demands he knew would be rejected--including diplomatic recognition for East Germany and an end to West German ties to West Berlin.

Security Gambit. As expected, Brandt said no to Ulbricht's demands, but he adroitly batted the ball back into the old Spitzbart's court. He refused to enter into talks on recognition on the grounds that while East Germany may be a separate state, it "can never be a foreign country for us." At the same time, Brandt offered to negotiate a renunciation-of-force treaty with East Germany, similar to one already being discussed by the Soviets and West Germans in Moscow. In Warsaw later this month, the Poles and West Germans will start talks on a similar agreement.

Brandt looks to the German-to-German talks as a useful forum for discussing many issues--athletic competition, for example, and economic cooperation--that might help bring the two Germanys a bit closer. He promised to write a letter to East German Premier Willi Stoph in which he would make a formal proposal. Declared Brandt: "There must be, there can be and there will be negotiations between Bonn and East Berlin." At the same time, he blamed the East Germans for continuing tension between the two parts of Germany. Ulbricht and his cohorts, said Brandt, are "dogmatists and left-wing reactionaries whose own power is more important to them than peace among all the people of Europe."

In a deft ploy to enlist Soviet support for negotiations, Brandt said that West German participation in the Soviet-sponsored European security conference would depend on progress toward the solution of Germany's internal problems. Brandt is well aware that the security conference, which Moscow wants to convene either late this year or early in 1971 to ratify Europe's existing borders, is a major goal of Soviet diplomacy. The Kremlin is so eager to hold the conference that Soviet officials said publicly last week that they would welcome American attendance. Previously, they had been lukewarm toward the idea. It is too early to tell, however, whether the Soviets, who have recently stiffened their attitude toward Brandt, want the security conference badly enough to pressure Ulbricht into even a semblance of cooperation with Bonn.

Brandt went out of his way to point out that his government remains committed to the West. His emphasis on better relations with Eastern Europe has raised fears, notably in France, that West Germany is headed toward a Rapallo-style deal with the Communists that could upset the balance of power in Europe. Stressing Bonn's reliance on the Atlantic Alliance, Brandt declared: "The Federal Republic is no wanderer between two worlds." He buttressed the point by announcing that he would visit French President Georges Pompidou later this month, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson in March and President Nixon in April.

At first, Brandt's approach seemed to have little effect on the Christian Democratic opposition, which accused him of breaking with West Germany's historic stand on unification. Under a succession of C.D.U. Chancellors, Bonn asserted its claim to be the sole legitimate representative of the German people, East or West, and held that unification could come about only through free elections in East Germany. In the post-address debate, former Chancellor Kurt Kiesinger cried that "We want not only the achievement of national unity but also the unity of state as well." One delegate even accused the Chancellor of "jeopardizing" Bonn's sovereignty. Nonetheless, after letting off steam, the Christian Democrats agreed to support Brandt's policy toward East Germany. Even if his Ostpolitik has run into some resistance in the Communist countries, it still commands support in West Germany.

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