Germans bid farewell to smalltown capital

GERMANY CLOSED the book yesterday on "the best 50 years" of its history, bidding an emotional farewell to its small-town capital on the Rhine.

Barring wars or similar unforeseen calamities, yesterday's session of the Bundestag was the last in the reductionist concrete chamber in Bonn. The next time MPs gather will be under the glass dome of the imposing Reichstag, in a city burdened with a great deal of unhappy history, but mercifully devoid of Bonn's stifling provinciality.

Yesterday marked the start of the long goodbye. The freight trains carrying office furniture from the ministries in Bonn to their new Berlin homes - often temporary - will soon be rolling. Chancellor Gerhard Schroder is due to set out his stall in Berlin at the end of August.

The Chancellery, like most of the new public buildings, will not be ready for at least another year. In the meantime, the First Family will live in a villa in the leafy suburb of Grunewald.

Mr Schroder does not seem to mind the inconvenience. He has made some hurtful remarks about Bonn, and demonstratively refused to move there after his election victory last September. To him and his government, Berlin represents a new beginning; the move serving as German democracy's rites of passage from its angst-ridden beginnings to middle-aged respectability.

The word "normality" was on many a lip yesterday as MPs debated a motion of thanks to Bonn. Normality is what Germany has been striving for in the past half a century, and still no one is sure whether the country is at last ready for a normal capital. Helmut Kohl, for one, is full of foreboding. "We are moving to Berlin, but not into a new republic," the former Chancellor declared yesterday, in the first speech to the Bundestag since he lost the elections last September. Mr Kohl pleaded for more of his kind of humility, and less of the flashiness displayed by his successor. And in a trembling voice, he warned about the ghosts his successors will be encountering in Berlin. "The return of the government to Berlin must not result in the restoration of things from the past," he said.

Wolfgang Thierse, the Social Democrat leader of the Bundestag, pledged: "The co-ordinates of German politics will not change." To underline this continuity, in its last act, parliament inaugurated the republic's new President, Johannes Rau, a Rhinelander old enough to remember the war.