The German government was on the move this week, busily shipping desks and files 600 km east to its new home in the former capital of Berlin. On July 1, Parliament sat in Bonn for the last time. On Monday, the trucks and trains started rolling. By September, most of the federal ministries should be up and running in the romantic city on the Spree, and members of Parliament will be poised to meet in the renovated "Deutscher Bundestag -- Plenarbereich Reichstagsgebaude," or German Federal Assembly -- Plenary Area, Imperial Assembly Building. (Germans too busy for polysyllabic symbolic niceties naturally continue to refer to the historic building as the Reichstag).
Symbolism, of course, is what this shift is all about. To begin with, it reminds Germans and foreign observers alike why the capital was moved to Bonn in the first place. It seems fitting that Germany will close out the 20th century -- which it did so much to disrupt and disgrace -- with a farewell to the Rhine city where half the country quietly licked its war wounds for over 50 years. When the newly reunited government decided in 1991 to return to Berlin, the urge to put this penitential period behind it was surely a motive, along with the fact that the West German constitution specifically anticipated it.
Also important, however, were symbolic gestures of a more forward-looking kind: If East and West Germany were to merge successfully, the prosperous, triumphant "Wessis" needed to reassure the impoverished, vanquished "Ossis" of their equal status. They were not equal, in fact, but it would only add insult to injury to govern the country's eastern regions from a city situated so far to the west. Berlin, conveniently, lies so far east it is barely 80 km from the Polish border.