The basic stuff of the news is vivid, accurate reporting of day-by-day events. Sometimes this is the best that can be done, and readers must make their own interrelationships between separate events. But at other times it becomes possible to find, in seemingly unrelated happenings, a context that reflects an entire nation's mood. This week events in five countries enabled TIME correspondents and editors to take a searching look at several such situations. Items:
∙In Bonn, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's decision to withdraw to the comparative quietude of his nation's presidencya decision he acknowledged had been made quicklysymbolically ended an era in postwar...