Undercover Cover

The city of Munich has rivalries with almost all of Germany's other major cities. These rivalries are based on all kinds of small annoyances and challenged boasts; the best sausages, the strongest beers, the most expensive soccer team, the beauty of female inhabitants -- you name it, the Bavarian capital will want to fight over it.

One of the few struggles Munich has come out second best in is the quest to be the capital of the whole of Germany. In fact, it didn't even come out second best. When it came to choosing a Cold War capital once Berlin had been divided, Munich didn't even get a look in. That honor went to the picturesque and sleepy city of Bonn.

When the Berlin Wall came down, Munich again held on to the unlikely hope that the unified city would be too busy celebrating freedom and selling knock-off East German merchandise to be concerned with a return as the nation's seat of power. Far from passing on the honor in favor of uninterrupted recovery, Berlin welcomed the mantle and thrived on it.

Hundreds of kilometers down south, tankards of Weizen beer were spat in disgust. Munich had been overlooked and for a city, which is the capital of a state which at times has considered itself to be a separate entity, that was hard to take.

Covert operation targets Berlin's image

It now appears that a diligently well-conceived operation was put into motion soon after German unification. Munich would begin a covert mission to convince the country that it, not Berlin -- and certainly not Bonn, would be the German capital for the 21st century.

However, those behind this Bavarian psychological operation underestimated the Berliners' powers of observation. Rather than being so blinded by their own global reputation for hipness and cool to notice the little details in life, the capital's citizens have perhaps ended Munich's attempt at usurpation before it really ever began.

The first stage of this larger plan, to subvert the image of Berlin through a subtly positioned picture of Munich's city hall on the front cover of Berlin's new phone book, looks to have been rumbled. But not before 700,000 of the books had been sent out to the capital's post offices.

Smallest of victories

While the "mistake" has now been noticed and widely commented on, the fact that so many of the books are available can -- and undoubtedly will -- be claimed by the capital's southern rivals as a small victory in its campaign to unsettle Berlin's poise.

And small it indeed is as the Berlin phone book comes in two volumes, but only the L-Z book bears an image from Munich. The A-K volume features a photo of Berlin's main train station. Whoever was responsible was either on a staged schedule of misinformation or was disturbed before the coup de grace was executed.

The publishing house in charge of the book, TVG Verlag, avoided any use of the term "Bavarian mole" when explaining the "very regrettable mistake", choosing instead to state the obvious: "Two images were switched," spokesperson Frank Wenz told Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel on Thursday, May 22. Yes, Frank, but by whom?

Berlin searches for further signs of infiltration

Since Berlin no longer has checkpoints at exit points around its perimeter, it is presumed that the Bavarian mole has slipped through the authorites' fingers. But the city is now on the lookout for any other evidence of infiltration.

Rumors that local Bundesliga team Hertha Berlin has had to have its new uniform returned because it bore the name of Bavarian beer company Paulaner as its sponsor are so far unsubstantiated.