Chancellor Helmut Kohl

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev said that talks with visiting West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl have "broken the ice" between their two countries. Relations had been strained by deployment of Pershing 2 missiles in West Germany and by Kohl's 1986 remark comparing Gorbachev to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. The missiles are being removed under a U.S.-Soviet arms agreement.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz flew into London on Tuesday aboard a West German Luftwaffe jetliner after his own 29-year-old U.S. Air Force craft failed in Bonn. Shultz and a scaled-down version of his 47-person entourage left Bonn about 2 1/2 hours late after meetings with Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Defense Minister Manfred Woerner and former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl has every reason to be happy these days. On the eve of the oddest non-campaign in this nation's election history, the German electorate seems cautiously optimistic about the future. No sizzling confrontation about what is still an unacceptedly high unemployment rate (8.

The tall and rather ungainly candidate mounts the rostrum, shakes hands all around, and launches comfortably into his standard campaign speech. Chancellor Helmut Kohl's rhetoric ignites no fire in his audiences, but he delivers the conservative message that they like to hear in this baroque Bavarian city on the Danube, near the Austrian border.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl told the Bundestag on Thursday that Newsweek magazine misquoted him when it said he compared Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev with Josef Goebbels, Adolf Hitler's minister of propaganda. But a tape recording of the interview, released by the magazine, called his statement into question. Kohl, speaking before the lower house of the National Assembly, continued to maintain that Newsweek had distorted his remarks, which were made in an interview two weeks ago.

The opposition Social Democrats chose Johannes Rau as their candidate for chancellor today after he demanded that U.S. nuclear missiles be withdrawn from West Germany. He also urged the Soviets to reduce their missile strength and said he would cancel participation in the U.S. "Star Wars" program. The left-leaning party voted 425 to 1 with three abstentions to make him the leader of its ticket in national elections Jan. 25. Rau will face conservative Chancellor Helmut Kohl, a staunch U.S.

President Richard von Weizsaecker first attracted worldwide attention more than a year ago when he gave a remarkable speech to the federal Parliament urging West Germans to face their wartime past squarely and without flinching. The speech, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the German surrender, was not popular in every quarter. The older generation of Germans was reluctant to dwell on memories of World War II; the younger generation saw no reason to be reminded.

The legal proceedings against Chancellor Helmut Kohl filed by a state prosecutor in the Rhineland city of Koblenz have been dropped because of insufficient evidence, a West German government spokesman said Wednesday. Spokesman Friedhelm Ost said that Koblenz Chief Prosecutor Hans Seeliger ruled that the evidence accumulated during the three-month investigation did not warrant any official charges being filed.

West Germany, the world's third-largest market economy, seems headed for a new era of prosperity--in substantial measure made possible by Chancellor Helmut Kohl's reform program, which his conservative-liberal coalition initiated after taking power in Bonn three years ago. The original goals of that program--to "consolidate" a runaway budget while cutting inflation and boosting business confidence--are being achieved.