Among the musty stuffed owls, elephant skeletons and glass-eyed bears at Bonn's Koenig Museum, Western Germany's leaders met last week. They displayed more unity and guts than anyone had had a right to hope three months ago.
The delegates to Western Germany's "parliamentary council" were top politicians and union leaders who in the past had wanted nothing to do with a Western German government or the Western occupation authorities; most were grey survivors of concentration camps, or sadder & wiser leftovers from the Weimar Republic. Some were unknown men whose only distinction was that, under the Hitler regime, they had fought...