An article written by one of your reporters, “German reunity not easy”, The Northern Star, Oct. 31 revealed a remarkable misunderstanding of what I said in the panel discussion on the reunification of Germany.

She wrote: “Osterle followed with a synopsis of the German Democratic Party and how the East Germans are trying to get away from them. He said ‘the Germans draft for a new constitution is commendable.'”

What she should have written approximately: “O. followed with a synopsis of the German Democratic Republic, i.e. East Germany, and how its citizens were trying to flee from it as in a stampede.

“The East German draft for a new constitution was commendable. However, it was discarded because of the election of March 18, 1990, which paved the way for the rapid reunification of the two countries.”

A member of the audience sitting in the back of the room told me that my presentation on the panel was clearly audible. The author of the article might have mentioned that the presentations were followed by a long discussion in which many questions were aired.

This would have been an opportunity for her to bring up her own elementary questions about what was going on. She also might have acted like other reporters of our paper did on two occasions when they were not sure of the facts.

They called me up in order to verify the facts before printing what they thought they had heard. The interesting details she gave about the draft for the East German constitution were correct but somewhat useless in view of the complete misrepresentation of the overall picture in the above quotation.

einz D. Osterle

Professor of German