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GERMANY - Every day, eight trains laden with Government files pull out of Bonn, the former capital of West Germany, and head towards Berlin, capital of reunited Germany, 600km away.
Every day, 28 planes make the same trip, this time with a human cargo: ministers, their advisers, their secretaries and platoons of underlings.
Their ministries are in Bonn but they have to attend meetings in Berlin.
This bizarre bureaucratic circus which shuttles to and fro across Germany is the legacy of a 1994 law to compensate Bonn for the decision to place united Germany's capital in Berlin.
Six ministries - defence, health, development aid, education, environment and agriculture - retained their headquarters on the River Rhine, while the other ministers shuffled off to the River Spree, to be alongside the federal Parliament and the chancellery.
The law, ironclad, stipulates that more federal workers must be based in Bonn than in Berlin. Today, 16 years after reunification, 10,200 are in Bonn, and 8800 in Berlin.
But a growing posse of politicians is demanding change.
They are fed up with the costs - €11 million ($20.5 million) in air travel alone in 2005 - and irked by the loss of working time, the inefficiency of snatched meetings in real life, and frustrations of long-distance phone conversations and videophones.
The man behind the campaign is the Prime Minister of the western state of Lower Saxony, Christian Wulff, a Christian Democrat.
"The time has come to end the division of ministries between Bonn and Berlin," he said in a letter to a Berlin politician. "All ministries should be headquartered in Berlin."
Wulff, attacked as a turncoat by other western German politicians, has been eagerly backed by the presidents of the five states that made up the former East Germany.
They reflect a wide body of opinion in the former communist east, where unemployment still affects about a fifth of the workforce, federal subsidies are getting tighter and "Wessi" - western - bureaucrats are loathed for their smugness. Many Bonnites who moved to Berlin complain of the capital's noise and dirt and mourn the leafy quiet of Bonn, the small town in Germany so tellingly portrayed by John Le Carre.
"Keeping federal ministries in Bonn in 2007 is an anachronism," said Georg Milbradt, the Prime Minister of Saxony.
He pointed out that millions of East Germans had had to adapt to a new life because of reunification.
"That should apply to Government, too, especially given that the Bonn region has already received lots of compensation," he said.
Far from being devastated by reunification, Bonn has done well. In addition to keeping its regiments of ministerial servants, the city hosts 22 other Government agencies and a small constellation of United Nations bodies, including the headquarters of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the parent of the Kyoto Protocol.
Unemployment in Bonn is lower and male longevity higher than the national average and, according to the weekly Der Spiegel, so many women are having babies that the local birth rate exceeds mortality, a rare phenomenon indeed for Germany. By 2020, the city's population will have grown by 10,000.
Berlin, though, has suffered from the East's de-industrialisation, refurbishing decrepit housing estates and the social trauma of reunification.
The capital's champions say that if you want to see the real Germany today, warts and all, you must go to battered and rebuilt Berlin, not the eerily quiet, bourgeois avenues of Bonn.
A decade ago, one reason for dividing the Government was to help "anchor" Germany in Western Europe and dilute the risk of a return to dictatorship.
But with Germany now a mature democracy and a 27-nation European Union that reaches the Russian border, that argument is out of date, the daily Die Welt says.
"Europe no longer stops at the River Elbe, the German-Polish border," it commented.
The Bonn-Berlin row is set to expand in the coming months, but may well lead nowhere. One reason is money.
According to Germany's federal audit office, €10 billion was spent in the first move to Berlin in 2000 and another €5 billion would be needed today to shift the remaining bureaucrats there. That is nearly 500 times the annual Bonn-Berlin travel costs today, and far more than the cash-strapped Government can afford.
