From the Managing Editor

By Henry Muller

Several times in the past decade, TIME's worldwide editions have devoted entire issues to a single, very compelling topic: the Soviet Union in 1980, Japan in 1983, immigrants to the U.S. in 1985 and the Soviet Union again in 1989. Two weeks ago, for the first time, we prepared a special issue on German unification expressly for our international audience. American readers will find highlights from this issue in the magazine this week.

Our decision to produce a special issue overseas reflects not only the importance of the subject but also our commitment to a global audience. With an Atlantic circulation of 510,000, TIME is the largest international weekly newsmagazine in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The same is true in Asia, with 270,000 copies sold weekly. We also sell 350,000 magazines a week in Canada, 90,000 in Latin America and 145,000 in the South Pacific. With an additional 4 million issues in the U.S., we have a worldwide circulation of more than 5.3 million, for an estimated readership of 30 million.

Our approach abroad is based on the premise that foreign readers know more about certain subjects than Americans do -- and less about others. We delete stories that are of purely national concern (for example, on U.S. sports) and add others that are of interest abroad.

The person in charge of this complex operation is assistant managing editor Karsten Prager. Born in 1936 in the East Prussian capital of Konigsberg (now the Soviet city of Kaliningrad), he finished secondary school in Recklinghausen, West Germany. He made his first visit to the U.S. in 1952 as an exchange student in Bronson, Mich., and later graduated from the University of Michigan. Prager joined TIME in 1965 as a correspondent in the Hong Kong bureau and has worked in Vietnam, New York City, San Francisco, Beirut and Madrid. He oversaw the Germany issue and, in a story based on conversations with eleven former classmates, looked at how Germans of his generation have fared. "They have no heroes," he says, "but they are proud that their country has become a mature democracy so firmly embedded in an integrated Europe."