Just 20 years ago, German lawmakers hunkered down for a passionate 10-hour debate to make a decision that seemed as momentous as it was a no-brainer: Should the capital of the newly reunified country remain where it was — in Bonn on the Rhine — or move back to its historic, eastern location on the Spree, amid the monuments and mixed memories of Berlin and Bonn.
At the time, on June 20, 1991, many people believed the deputies would insist on the cozy little capital remaining exactly where it had been established as the “provisional” seat of the West German government in 1949 — in Bonn.
The university city, after all, exemplified Gemütlichkeit — it was comfortable with itself, rooted in the West, placid as the surface of the broad river running through it. Certainly it had had its cold war moments, the “small town in Germany” made famous by John le Carré's eponymous novel as a nest of spies and intrigue.
Even Chancellor Willy Brandt, the very emblem of East-West reconciliation, discovered in 1974 that his personal assistant, Günter Guillaume, was an infiltrator working for Markus Wolf, the consummate East German spymaster.
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