West Germany: C’est Si Bonn

Under the disapproving gaze of two stuffed giraffes, West Germany’s leaders met in 1948 at Bonn’s zoological museum to draft their new constitution. Far from welcoming their decision to make Bonn West Germany’s “provisional” capital, most of the university town’s 100,000 inhabitants vociferously protested the choice. For the Bundesdorf, or “federal village,” as it is condescendingly called elsewhere in Germany, is a Peter Pan among cities. It never wanted to grow up into a capital, stubbornly resists every government scheme to make it function like one, and does its best to ignore the 200,000 additional citizens who have settled in Bonn itself and a score of towns and villages that cluster around it. “Bonn,” says Bundestag Vice President Carlo Schmid, “is not a metropolis. It’s an a-polis, a non-city.”

Sheep Crossing. Previously famed mainly as Ludwig van Beethoven’s birthplace, Bonn today is known to diplomats as the most inconvenient, uncomfortable capital this side of Usumbura. True, the Rhine offers a lovely, healing view to harassed government types, but Bonn is Germany’s rainiest (161.8 days a year) and most densely populated city; its traffic is the heaviest, its rentals among the highest. “The city is just half the size of Chicago’s Central Cemetery,” says a U.S. diplomat. “And twice as dead.”

Its main street, the Koblenzer Strasse, is part of the north-south highway from Cologne to Coblenz, and is perpetually jammed by 36,000 trucks and cars a day that must slow to a crawl to squeeze through the 18th century Koblenzer Gate in the middle of town. The 20,000 cars a day that travel east or west through Bonn have to cross a railroad line that bisects the city; at three level crossings the gates are closed for 360 trains a day, or an average of 20 minutes each hour. Capital traffic is also disrupted by a flock of 400 sheep that has to cross the highway, as well as the hay wagons that occasionally break down in town. In time, foreigners learn to take such quaint delays in their stride. “C’est si Bonn,” they shrug.

Slaughtered Legion. The federal a-polis has widely unnoted theatrical and opera companies and a dozen or so mediocre nightclubs, boasts only three starrable restaurants: the elegant, century-old Adler, a favorite of government gourmets and gossips called Maternus, and La Redoute, a rococo mansion where Beethoven once performed. For members of the 88 diplomatic missions in Bonn, the main diversions consist in attending one another’s parties—at least 20 a week—and the American Club’s Wednesday night bingo game. The Old Bonn families keep strictly to themselves; so do the town’s 13,000 university students and faculty members. New Bonners, as they call the 521 Bundestag members and 12,150 federal employees, usually go to Cologne or Coblenz for amusement. Most U.S. diplomats and journalists live and entertain each other in Bad Godesberg, Bonn’s picturesque neighbor, where the American colony is known variously as the Ghetto, the Compound or Westchester-on-Rhine.

The city’s antipathy to outsiders dates back to Roman times, when a legion garrisoned in “Bonna” was decimated by the warlike Batavi. Today local resentment manifests itself in Bonn’s constant fight to keep the government from taking over existing buildings or precious real estate. Recently, with bipartisan backing, Bundestag President Eugen Gerstenmaier disclosed plans for a new parliamentary center on the Rhine, consisting of a 25-story office building for Deputies, a twelve-story hotel and an 18-story press center, as well as a series of bridges across the railroad tracks. Bonn’s burghers protested that Gerstenmaier’s “Brasilia,” as the stuffy Rheinische Post dubbed it, would occupy their best recreational land. The program has been postponed for years, since the government has always clung to the belief that by putting up permanent buildings in a “provisional” capital it might weaken its claim that Berlin and the rest of Germany must ultimately be reunited.

Pentabonn. As a result, government ministries are strung miles apart in makeshift, inadequate buildings that range from a pre-empted hotel, where each office has a private bath, to a converted Wehrmacht barracks. Embassies are scattered from Cologne, 18 miles north of Bonn, to Rolandseck, ten miles south in the neighboring state of Rhineland Palatinate, where the Russians have taken over an old resort hotel. Chilean diplomats must work above the din of a five-and-dime store on the floor be low; the small, ugly British chancellery is smack in the middle of a cornfield, across the street from a Coca-Cola plant. New buildings, like the sprawling U.S. office complex known as the Pentabonn, have been cannily designed so that they can be converted to local use as hospitals, industries and schools should the capital ever move back to Berlin.

Bonn’s villagers, old, new, academic and foreign, can hardly wait for that happy day. Meanwhile, the new $34 million building program should at least make life more enjoyable for a crackpot who tried to burn down Beethoven’s birthplace (now a museum) a few years ago. Asked why he had done it, the arsonist demanded with impeccable logic: “In this whole town, what else is there worth burning?”