"Hello, boys," cries Ursula Schubert, 39, waving to a pair of green- uniformed border guards in Posseck, East Germany. Without bothering to show a passport or other identification, Schubert, with two of her children in tow, strolls past the smiling guards and across a blacktop that covers part of what was once the "death zone" between the two Germanys. "I'm off to pick up the newspapers," she explains, gesturing toward the West German border post 200 yards away.
There are few formalities at the Posseck crossing these days. Traveling from East to West has become so commonplace that nobody, not even the border guards, pays much attention. Yet as recently as a year ago, entering that stretch of plowed frontier was an offense that could bring death. Until last year the East German guards, today pleasant and unarmed, carried automatic weapons and had orders to shoot anyone trying to escape to the West. Until the mid-1980s there were mines and trip-wire-triggered automatic guns, and even now the zone may not be entirely safe. "Stay on the footpath," Schubert warns her youngest son, Christian, 3. "We don't know if they took away all the mines."
The Posseck crossing is one of 73 holes hacked into the 858-mile-long East- West German border since Nov. 9, when East Germany granted its citizens unrestricted travel rights. Schubert's daily chore is to pick up 25 copies of the Frankenpost, a newspaper published in Hof, a sizable town on the West German side. She is unaware of and untroubled by the fact that politicians in Bonn and Berlin have yet to agree on terms for the distribution of West German newspapers, which have been banned in East Germany for the past three decades. "Frankenpost has a special edition for us, with advertisements for clothes and such," she says. "The West German border police bring the papers along, and I pass them out in the village. Sometimes it's hard to believe this is happening."
Yet it is happening. In a thousand ways large and small, the two Germanys are being united. Not by law, not by treaty, not by politicians: what is happening is happening from the bottom up. Silence and suspicion have been replaced by traffic jams and love affairs. While the allies talk of treaty commitments and politicians dither over the touchy issue of unification, Germans East and West are playing soccer together, going shopping together, drinking beer together, dancing together and, oddly, breeding rabbits together. "Don't laugh," says Arnold Friedrich, the mayor of Modlareuth, a divided border town near Hof. "There are rabbit strains over there that have developed separately, and rabbit breeders are eager to get them. There are government rules on sending animals across. So naturally, smuggling rabbits is very active."