East Germany Foreign Relations West Germany

West Germany is scrambling to prepare for an impending invasion from the East on a scale that North Atlantic Treaty Organization war games never dared to imagine. On Wednesday, the entire 90,000-strong East German Volksarmee will join forces with the West German Bundeswehr in a military merger of former foes.

Ten years after their artful diplomacy toppled the Berlin Wall, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, George Bush and Helmut Kohl gathered among the ghostly traces of the hated Cold War symbol Monday to take their bows and reflect on the hopes and fears of Nov. 9, 1989, when the world as they knew it changed overnight.

Americans are not worried about the prospect of a reunified Germany once again dominating Europe, but the notion scares people in Poland and concerns the British and French, according to a survey conducted jointly by The Times Poll and The Economist. In the abstract, Americans and the French overwhelmingly favor the idea of reuniting West Germany and East Germany nearly 45 years after the crushing defeat of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.

THROUGH TIMES OF inspiring artistry and unspeakable evil, this leafy city on the Spree River has been at center stage for many of Europe's great 20th century dramas. Drafting board for two world wars, seat of the doomed Weimar Republic, nerve center for the Holocaust and Communist dictators, and front line for the Cold War, Berlin carries staggering historical baggage into its new role as the heart of a mended Germany and an integrating Europe.

It did not end like cloak-and-dagger stories are supposed to, with briefcases exchanged on foggy bridges or midnight dashes across nameless borders. Instead, one of the most thrilling chapters in Cold War espionage closed with a German nursery rhyme sung by a lonely, drunken spy: "All my little duckies, swimming on the pond . . . heads deep in water, tails to the sky."

An East German military court sentenced a West German man to eight years in jail on Thursday for espionage, the official news agency ADN said. ADN said that Bernd Manthey was found guilty of military espionage against East Germany and "treasonable passing of information."

When East German head of state Sabine Bergmann Pohl gathered ambassadors to her presidential quarters last week for a toast to German unity, the celebration was tinged with a note of apology. The envoys, all 74 of them, had been put out of a job by the very event they had been called together to cheer. Joining them in joblessness will be 2,000 East German diplomats, made redundant by the reunification taking effect today.

President Bush on Thursday hailed the opening of East Germany's borders as a "liberation," but he urged East Germans to resist the pull of the West and remain at home to reform their country. The announcement from East Berlin caught Bush Administration officials by surprise, sending shock waves through the White House and the government's foreign policy Establishment and leading some U.S. officials to worry that the changes that have rocked East Germany are coming too fast.

West Germany's highest court on Saturday rejected the current rules for December's all-German elections, a move likely to split the left-wing vote and further strengthen Chancellor Helmut Kohl's chances of reelection. The decision by the Federal Constitutional Court appeared to throw a life preserver to small East German parties, which had played a key role in last fall's East German revolution but had seemed likely to face extinction in the unified German vote, scheduled for Dec. 2.

West Germany's Lufthansa airlines landed in West Berlin on Sunday for the first time since the end of World War II, picking up Soviet children who had spent their vacation in East Germany and returning them to the Soviet Union. The airline, which had not been allowed to fly into Berlin since 1945, needed special permission to land in the long-divided city from the victorious World War II Allies--France, Britain, the United States and Soviet Union.

THEY CROSSED INTO A NEW WORLD with trepidation, slack-jawed at the sight of the welcome that waited. Cameras flashed, champagne flowed, flowers and deutschmarks flew at them. Hands reached out to pat the sad little East German jalopies as they chuffed through Checkpoint Charlie, silent gestures of congratulation from West German brothers too moved by a miracle of history to trust their voices.

Broad and meandering as it nears the end of its journey to the North Sea, the Elbe River has been pumping life into this fortress town of brick factories and half-timbered farmhouses since it was founded in the 13th century as a tollgate for Saxon traders. The river was highway, port and playground for those on either side of its island-stubbled shallows. Even in the icy depths of the Cold War, there was something about it that symbolized the power of common purpose and better days.

It was only a few weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall that Walfriede Schmitt stopped kidding herself. The noted stage and screen actress--a Communist Party member and committed builder of a socialist utopia--was watching television with her teenage son, Matthias. A newscaster for the state network explained that droves of East Germans fleeing to the West were victims of foreign agents who had drugged their tea.

The Soviet KGB and East Germany's Stasi tried to thwart German unification hours after the Berlin Wall collapsed by sending false reports of civilian unrest to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Chancellor Helmut Kohl says in a book, "I Wanted German Unity," to be published Tuesday. Kohl tells how Gorbachev telephoned him during a rally in West Berlin on Nov. 10, 1989, to seek reassurance that events in the city were not "completely out of hand."

H e was a father of the East German revolution, but Pastor Friedrich Schorlemmer is saddened by much of what has come of the fall of East Germany, and Germany's subsequent unification.

This community of 23,000 was a Communist poster-town during the East German years: an adequate if dreary-looking settlement built up around a single huge truck factory, a place where most people enjoyed cradle-to-grave security in drab, prefabricated cement apartment blocks thrown up by the state. Today, life is far more uncertain and also far more exciting.

The Big Four victors of World War II and the two halves of defeated Germany agreed here Tuesday to begin historic talks "shortly" to reunify Germany and to discuss the security concerns of neighboring states. After a frenetic day of bilateral talks among their foreign ministers, the six nations issued a brief statement that, however vague, begins a process that will finally lead to a peace settlement with Germany 45 years after the end of the war.

To the cheers of thousands of onlookers, East German army units Monday began dismantling the first major section of the infamous Berlin Wall, a barrier that for nearly three decades symbolized a divided Europe. Using heavy mechanized equipment, the soldiers began to remove the top portions of the 13-foot-high concrete wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate. East German authorities said initial plans call for removing a 1.

The full-bellied bronze statue planted on Pforzheim's main shopping street is a tribute to prosperous times. "Manly Figure," says the plaque next to the satisfied Herr . "Here I stand, the fat one, thanks to many donations by my Pforzheim friends." Pforzheim is the "Gold City," leveled by Allied aircraft in 20 minutes near the end of World War II and rebuilt on its ruins by a successful jewelry industry, plus mail-order houses and machine-tool makers.

Ilona Wolke misses East German ketchup. It may not have been the best, she admits, but she grew up on it and liked it. As with many things East German, Wolke's favorite ketchup disappeared amid the avalanche of change that accompanied German reunification, and she complains that the replacement products--all from the West--not only taste different but contain additives.