The events surrounding the tragic illness and death of President-elect Tancredo Neves have led some observers to ascribe a new political maturity to Brazil. Nevis, the grandfatherly figure who was to become the first civilian president most Brazilians had ever known, never took the oath of office. Instead, it fell to an unlikely and unpredictable politician named José Sarney to break the string of generals who have ruled the country since a bloodless military coup in 1964. During the five weeks of Neves's lingering intestinal ailment, Sarney ruled as acting president with the collaboration of the country's entire political and civilian leadership. Now, without a figure of national unity to rely upon, Sarney—a former head of the military governments's party, who only last summer became a convert to the democratic opposition—holds in his hands the fate of the government that Brazilians have labeled hopefully the New Republic.

If you want to understand West Berlin's history and present political reality, take the train from Hanover or Hamburg. The border crossing from West to East Germany gives the first clue. Barbed wire and high fences line the track; police line the station platform. The few East German civilians who are waiting for their own trains seem to look right through you as though you were invisible—a ghost train heading for Berlin.

Once upon a time there were two Papandreous—Papandreou plre and Papandreou fils—and one Caramanlis. Now there is only a Papandreou fils, Andreas.

The last of these to depart the political scene, President Constantine Caramanlis, was the man who Queen Frederica and the United States had chosen over many more senior heads of the conservative Right for the premiership of Greece in 1955. Then a mere forty-eight, he reigned over an ultraconservative government that was at times severely repressive and not above rigging elections or making use of political thugs. Forced out by Frederica in 1963 amidst the scandal of the Lambrakis case—the subject of the highly successful film Z—Caramanlis went into selfimposed exile in Paris.