For years, the West German weather map has said a lot about the country's political climate. Though German lands east of the Oder and Neisse rivers were put under Polish control at the close of World War II, West Germany's two television networks never renounced the German claim to the former provinces of Silesia, most of Pomerania and East Prussia. Each night 26 million West German television viewers saw a map that boldly portrayed German borders as they were in 1937, including the huge slices of land that now belong to Poland.
The Polish government regularly attacked the map as...