Capital Gain

Bonn, complains one longtime German diplomat, is "not a capital but a form of capital punishment." A guidebook once described the foggy little university town (1946 pop. 94,694), the birthplace of Beethoven, as "a favorite resting place for retired officials in the evening of their lives." Lacking first-line hotels, nightclubs and airport, it is often jeeringly called "the federal village." The streets are cobbled, narrow, picturesquely obstructed by vegetable markets and, at one conspicuous intersection, by a medieval gate that funnels all traffic into a single lane. The main rail line between Cologne and Koblenz runs smack through the middle of the town, and for 20 minutes of every hour the guardrails are down, halting all traffic as the trains shuttle through.

When Chancellor Konrad Adenauer picked Bonn as temporary headquarters for the new federal republic of West Germany, it was supposed to serve only until Germany was reunified and Berlin restored as the rightful capital. In fact, its provisional character became a symbol of West Germans' refusal to acquiesce in the division of their country, and, as such, was sedulously maintained. Eleven years later the Ministry of Transport is still over a bank, Atomic Affairs in a hotel, Treasury in a castle on the Rhine. The diplomatic set is even more far-flung-- the Russians in a former resort hotel ten miles out of town, the Chileans upstairs over a Woolworth store.

As the government grew, great, boxlike buildings have risen to house the Parliament and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Defense Ministry is starting to build an eleven-story headquarters on the outskirts, so massive that German newspapers call it "the Pentabonn." But even here the provisional fiction was preserved --all new buildings were so designed that they could be converted to other uses, e.g., the Bundestag building is to be turned into a teachers' college, the Defense Ministry into a hospital.

Today, 335,000 people jam into Bonn and the surrounding towns. This year Chancellor Adenauer, whose foes always claimed he picked Bonn as the capital because his own home is right across the river in the village of Rhoendorf, prodded the Bonn municipality into drawing up a plan to widen streets, build railroad underpasses, and even clear blocks of old houses to make room for federal office buildings. Estimated cost: $150 million.

But who would pay for it? Bonn's city fathers pointed out that they would not need to make the improvements if Bonn were not the capital, and federal budgeteers objected that such a commitment by the federal government would betray the long insistence that Germany must one day be reunited.

The Old Man called in his federal planners, brushed aside their argument. "Don't we live too crowded around here?" he snapped. Last week officials were scurrying to find ways to tap federal funds. Next spring, at Adenauer's orders, the federal village will begin to look less provisional and more like what Adenauer has made it--the seat of Western Europe's most affluent state.

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