With 3.4 million residents, Berlin is 10 times the size of Bonn and many seem to think it has about 10 times as many urban problems. While quiet Bonn is Beethoven's birthplace and offers bike paths that connect almost everything, Berlin throbs with culture and subculture, vice and violent crime, immigrants and unemployment. Unlike Bonn and much of Western Germany, Berlin is genuinely multicultural. To the Social Democratic chancellor, his aides say, Bonn is too closely identified with the old West Germany and particularly with Mr. Kohl's conservative Christian Democratic Party, which practically built Bonn. Even the main thoroughfare in Bonn's government quarter is named after Konrad Adenauer, the first postwar chancellor and towering Christian Democrat.
Berlin stands for the end of the Cold War and of the nation's political division.
A new sort of economic reality will confront the politicians accustomed to West Germany's postwar wealth. Berlin is poor. Not only did it merge with former Communist East Berlin, but western Berlin no longer receives subsidies that sustained it when it was surrounded by East Germany. Its debt has risen fourfold to 60 billion DM since the wall fell. In that sense, the Berlin Republic will reflect the nation's lurch from Cold War wealth to postunification austerity.