Changing Climate

For years, the West German weather map has said a lot about the country's political climate. Though German lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers were put under Polish control at the close of World War II, West Germany's two television networks never renounced the German claim to the former provinces of Silesia, most of Pomerania and East Prussia. Each night 26 million West German television viewers saw a map that boldly portrayed German borders as they were in 1937, including the huge slices of land that now belong to Poland.

The Polish government regularly attacked the map as a provocation, but a Munich newspaper more accurately described it as "half masochism and half revanchism." But as West German Chancellor Willy Brandt embarked upon his Ostpolitik, which aims at better relations with Bonn's eastern neighbors, the map became an embarrassment.

Last week West Germany's TV networks quietly adopted an Ostpolitik of their own. As the newscast for the first time switched from black and white to color, the networks introduced a new weather map that reflected the changing political climate. Instead of a dark gray Germany reaching from the Rhine to include a part of today's Poland, and even into the U.S.S.R., the new map revealed a brown-and-green Europe that contained the names of major cities but no political boundaries at all. The Poles were relieved. "West German television," reported the Polish News Agency, "has given up its territorial claims." As an indication of West Germany's own changing attitudes, the networks had received only three letters of complaint at last report.

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