But if the West German capital could not be in Berlin, where would it be? For some time, political leaders in the western sectors had been pondering this question, debating the pros and cons of a number of cities, from Hamburg to Munich. By 1948 the race had essentially narrowed to Frankfurt and Bonn. To many Germans, the former city seemed the ideal choice. It was centrally located, cosmopolitan, and it had a rich democratic tradition. Yet for many other inhabitants of western Germany, Frankfurt’s very attractiveness, its obviousness as a choice, made it undesirable. The impending Federal Republic was supposed to be a provisional state, a way station on the road to reunification. Frankfurt was too imposing to be the capital of a way station. Bonn did not have this drawback, to put it mildly. With fewer than 100,000 residents in 1948, it was a midsized town, not a real city. Detractors said that the most important event to have happened there was the birth of Beethoven, who had left as soon as he could. On the other hand, with the backing of the state of Rhineland-Westphalia and the British, in whose occupation zone Bonn lay, the Rhineland town won the right to host the parliamentary council, a forerunner to the Bundestag. The British then crucially threw their support behind Bonn’s candidacy for the provisional capital, since it was obviously in London’s interest to have West Germany’s seat of government in its zone. The Americans, in whose zone Frankfurt lay, did not push for the Hessian city over Bonn because they did not wish to pull out of Frankfurt to make room for a new German government. Important, too, was the pro-Bonn politicking of Adenauer, who came from the area and who regarded the town as the best choice. Mustering all his persuasive power, Adenauer was able to convince a narrow majority of his colleagues in the parliamentary council to see things his way. On May 10, 1949, the council voted thirty-three to twenty-nine to make Bonn the provisional seat of government for the emerging Federal Republic. On November 3, 1950, after the new government had already started to function, that decision was confirmed.
Over the years, Bonn would inspire much derision in its role as capital of a major European nation. In his 1968 spy thriller,
What did the creation of the “Bonn Republic” mean politically to the inhabitants of West Berlin? Because Berlin as a whole remained under four-power Allied jurisdiction, West Berlin, though claiming status as a “land” of the Federal Republic, was part of the new nation only in a limited fashion. It could send representatives to the Bundestag, but they could not vote in plenary sessions. Federal laws were not automatically applied to West Berlin; they had to be extended to the city by the local House of Representatives and were subject to veto by the Allied commandants. Likewise subject to Allied veto was the promotion of all policemen in the upper ranks. West Berlin was fully integrated into the Federal Republic’s financial and economic system, but the Federal Constitution Court, sitting in Karlsruhe, had no jurisdiction in the city. The Western Allies insisted on these restrictions in order to maintain their own rights in Berlin under the Potsdam Agreement. Thus, not only did the West Berliners no longer reside in the capital of their nation, they were reduced to the status of second-class citizens. Their situation was rendered all the worse by the obvious hostility of the new chancellor, who did not even visit West Berlin until April 1950, when he stayed for a mere forty-eight hours.
The situation for East Berlin was very different. In violation of the Potsdam Agreement, Moscow allowed the new East German government to establish its capital in the Soviet sector of Berlin. In this way the GDR sought to buttress its claim to being the true Germany, the only legitimate Germany. Of course, the Federal Republic made this claim as well, but while
