From the Bottom Up

West Germans are enjoying a remarkable prosperity that would be weakened by unifying with their poorer brothers in Communist East Germany. This is one reason why West German politicians (who would as soon denounce motherhood as reunification) privately concede that the reunification issue is not as real as the noise it makes.

Even so, there are always politicians ready to demand a new, direct approach to Moscow. For them, Chancellor Adenauer found a timely and devastating answer last week. It came from France's Premier Guy Mollet, as he and Adenauer talked over the Saar settlement. On his recent trip to Moscow, Mollet was told by Khrushchev: "Seventeen million Germans in hand are preferable to 70 million united, even though neutral, Germans."

Yet, even while Bonn resists any high-level advances, Germans have begun to work toward unity from the bottom up. Items:

P: Germany is sending a combined Olympic team to Melbourne this fall.

P: East-West German trade flows at the rate of $276 million a year. No fewer than 1,589 top West German industrial firms, led by Krupp, offered their wares at the Soviet zone's spring Leipzig Fair.

P: The two banks of issue, the Bank Deutscher Laender and the Soviet zone's Deutsche Notenbank, carry on heavy correspondence over transfers, payment regulations and new issues, though their currencies are supposedly unrelated.

P: An overall German standardization committee supervises some 60 lesser committees regulating weights and measures in both Germanys.

P: Public-health officials on all levels tell each other about such matters as polio outbreaks, cancellation of doctors' licenses, drug-law violations.

P: The West German Plant Conservation Service at Kiel and the Soviet zone's Central Biological Office together maintain irrigation works that straddle the border, wage joint war against animal epidemics and that old enemy of German agriculture, the potato bug.

P: East and West rail headquarters keep in constant touch over train schedules, freight costs, tickets, border control. The West German shipping administration in Hamburg and the Soviet zone agency in Magdeburg deal with each other in keeping barge traffic flowing on the Elbe and the big Mittelland canal.

P: East and West agencies working on relief payments and pensions for war victims, as well as insurance companies on both sides, exchange files and reports.

P: Scientific and cultural groups are increasing their contacts. Scholars from three West German and two East German universities work shoulder to shoulder in East Berlin preparing the authoritative German dictionary and Monumenta Germaniae Historiae.

P: Local agreements multiply. Example: at Helmstedt a coal mine split by the Iron Curtain is again being worked as one mine instead of two.

P: Last week West Berlin's Mayor Otto Suhr announced the opening of negotiations with East Berlin authorities on administrative matters. He emphasized that his government was the sole legal government of Greater Berlin but that things like traffic control, telephones, cemeteries had to be regulated.

The growth of these contacts, said an official of Adenauer's Ministry for All-German Affairs last week, "will soften up the border and flood the Iron Curtain away." Or, to put it another way, such collaboration amounts to a toleration of, and a living with, the reality of the Russian-imposed two Germanys.

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