With their native politics still in limbo on Monday, German editorial pages had to look elsewhere for something to argue about, and the first obvious story is the damage done by Saturday's massive 7.6 earthquake in Kashmir, a natural disaster that appears to have killed over 20,000 people. The quake also rattled India and Afghanistan, but most of the dead and wounded seem to be in a remote and mountainous region of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, and Pakistan will have to rely on its neighbors for an unusual amount of help. Kashmir has been the cause of two wars between India and Pakistan since 1949, and for most German papers this need for cooperation in an already devastated region offers a glimmer of hope.

"Both sides must now transcend their own shadows and allow cross-border aid to the victims," writes the left-leaning daily, Die Tageszeitung. In particular, Pakistan, because "many of the affected regions are easier to reach from the Indian side of Kashmir than from Pakistan." As for India, "it must resist all displays of triumphalism and avoid linking aid to military goals or claims of sovereignty ... Then the earthquake might lead not just to cooperation between the enemy armies, which almost went to war in 2002, but also to a politics of peace."

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung agrees that this catastrophe presents an historic opportunity for India and Pakistan to make peace. "Whenever nature strikes with such massive destructive power, there are political aftershocks," the paper writes, citing the Indian Ocean tsunami in December as a prime example. That wave flooded two regions already mired in civil war -- Sri Lanka, where Tamil rebels had been fighting for a state of their own, and Aceh, where rebels fighting the Indonesian government for independence have recently agreed to a ceasefire. The paper argues that politics in both areas have moved toward peace in the wake of the disaster. Will the same dynamic work in Kashmir? "Earthquake aid will be a test case," the editorialist concludes, "to determine how serious each side is about overcoming its decades-long enmity."

The other issue exercising German papers has its origins in Asia, too -- the alarming (but still-not-life-threatening) progress of bird flu from the east. Hundreds of infected birds were culled in Romania and Turkey over the weekend, marking the virus' entrance to Europe, and two German papers rattled with apprehension and self-satire.

Until this year bird flu had been a strictly Asian disease, threatening livestock and people in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand. But early this summer the virus arrived in Siberia with migratory birds. Researchers have watched it move steadily across Russia for the last several months, and now. In Turkey, turkeys have died from the disease and infected chickens have been found there and in Romania. With the discovery of sick poultry in these countries, Europe must now consider what to do about its own stockyards. Bird flu hasn't killed a single human outside Asia yet, but researchers fear that a human mutation of the disease will start a flu epidemic  similar to the one after World War I, which killed between 20 and 40 million people.

"The fear of bird flu is like the fear of terrorism," writes the right-leaning daily, Die Welt. "No one can predict whether, when or how seriously it will affect us." Nevertheless, the paper argues there are a few measures that local and national governments can and should take. First, stockpile flu shots. Since the bird disease has no known cure, flu shots won't guard against human infection, but "they will protect against the highly dangerous scenario of a double infection with ordinary flu." Humans infected with both ordinary flu and the avian disease are considered incubators for a contagious human strain. Second, the paper warns, there should be no more free-range poultry. Chickens and ducks catch the disease from migratory birds, so: "chickens and ducks now belong in stalls -- and not just after the first cases of bird flu occurs in the area."