Berlin  - Berlin has a new telephone directory with an imposing city hall on the front cover - the wrong city hall. And to add insult to injury, it's the city hall of Munich, Berlin's chief rival down the years.

Some 700,000 of the new directories have been printed, ready for collection from post offices across the German capital, the daily Tagesspeigel reported Thursday.

Although both date from the middle of the last century, the two city halls do not even look remotely similar. Berlin's is a massive red-brick structure reminiscent of the Romanesque style, while Munich's is Neo-Gothic grey-stone.

Frank Wenz, a spokesman for the Frankfurt company that publishes the directory, acknowledged a "very regrettable error."

Staff at the company, which also published the Munich and Hamburg directories, had "mixed up" the two images, he said.

"We can only apologize to all Berliners offended by the mistake," Wenz said.

The wrong city hall is printed on the second L-Z volume only, while the A-K part shows Berlin's gleaming new steel-and-glass main railway station - the right one.

The mix-up was not complete, however. The second half of the Munich directory has, as planned, its own city hall on the front cover, complete with the famous Glockenspiel, the 43-bell carillon that draws tourists by the thousand every year. (dpa)