Although the Iron Curtain is less rigid than it used to be, Western newsmen are still welcomed cautiously in East Germany. After arriving in Leipzig, 90 miles southwest of the Berlin Wall, Chief European Correspondent William Rademaekers and Bonn Bureau Chief Bruce Nelan discovered that their time was not to be entirely their own. "The authorities," Rademaekers says, "had organized a togetherness program stretching over two weeks." Reluctantly, G.D.R. officials gave in to the correspondents' request to split up: Rademaekers traveled east to the Polish border, while Nelan went as far south as "Saxon Switzerland" near the Czech border.

Both correspondents found that the many East Germans they interviewed outside Berlin were friendlier--and far more talkative--than the uptight "press officers" in the capital. "Sometimes it was difficult to break away from their exemplary hospitality," says Nelan, who endured a four-hour tour of an alloy steel mill. Rademaekers met with more warmth than he had bargained for. "A heat wave was sweeping across East Germany," he complains, "and every window seemed locked up for the winter."

Nelan, a TIME correspondent since 1965, first visited East Germany last year, when he became Bonn bureau chief. Rademaekers, who has served in most of the European bureaus of TIME since joining in 1959, got his first taste of East Germany more than twelve years ago, and has been back as recently as last summer for a retrospective on the Berlin Wall.

The land boom, the personalities associated with it, the way land is used, and abused, in this country: these issues are the subject of a special section in this week's issue. Senior Editor Marshall Loeb supervised the project. Senior Editor Leon Jaroff and Associate Editor George Church split the task of editing the copy. Business Writer Donald Morrison dealt with the boom itself, Environment Writer Philip Herrera discussed the problems of land use, while Nation Writer Edwin G. Warner and Science Writer Frederic Golden contributed other features. This editorial team received a wealth of material filed by more than two dozen correspondents from all of TIME's U.S. news bureaus.

The "interdisciplinary" approach, which we have used before on major projects, seemed especially necessary in this case. Says Loeb: "From the way traffic moves through a city to the price of oil and food, the problem of land use has something to do with everyone in America."

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