THE headline news from Germany early this week was the electoral triumph of Mayor Willy Brandt in beleaguered West Berlin. But the accent on Berlin in the headlines--and in the newscasts--too often emphasized the present moment and neglected the past and the future. Using Berlin, Moscow has revived one of the oldest and bitterest cold war issues --the division of Germany into nations, one free, one Communist. Fearful of changing the status quo in Germany but equally fearful of doing nothing, statesmen of a dozen nations are today earnestly reexamining solutions to the problem proposed by ingenious men ranging from Poland's Communist Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki to Britain's Sir Anthony Eden. For a concise guide to these past proposals and the future possibilities, see FOREIGN NEWS, What To Do About Germany?

AT home, the biggest headlines concerned the fire at Our Lady of the Angels grammar school in West Side Chicago, the city's worst fire since the Iroquois Theater holocaust in 1903. In the case of the Berlin story, TIME'S function was to supply the information and intelligence that would help the reader to be knowledgeable about Berlin rather than to fret over it. In the case of the Chicago fire, TIME had another task--to take the facts of tragedy and mold them into a compelling narrative of misfortune and error. See NATIONAL AFFAIRS, The Chicago School Fire.

THERE have been few headlines I about Boris Pasternak since the two days on which he 1) received and 2) declined the 1958 Nobel Prize for literature. The nature of Pasternak's achievement is one that does not lend itself to headlines, but is nevertheless of the deepest concern to journalism. Says TIME: "Pasternak has called his book's tremendous success the 'Zhivago miracle,' but the paradox of the Pasternak miracle is equally compelling. He is a stubborn man who is not really a martyr. He is an aggrieved man and yet not an avenger. He is a man without weapons, wielding 'the irresistible power of unarmed truth.' Most paradoxically of all, out of Communist Russia, a society that officially denies the existence of God, Pasternak has sent a deeply Christian statement of the condition of man, such as most writers of the professedly Christian West are too embarrassed or too unbelieving to make." See BOOKS, The Passion of Yurii Zhivago.

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