Word: autobahns
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EAST German guards, their tommy guns swinging jauntily at their hips, last week pulled a striped red and white barrier across the autobahn checkpoint at Helmstedt on the border between East and West Germany. Two hours later, after cars and trucks had piled up for nearly a mile, the East Germans reopened the road and the traffic flowed once more between West Berlin and West Germany. It was a chilling reminder of West Berlin's vulnerability and a portent of what may come...
...military maneuver, powerful East German and Soviet forces moved into positions from which they could, if the order came, immediately choke off the ten road, rail and canal routes that link West Berlin to its markets and sources of supplies in West Germany. Columns of tanks rumbled alongside the autobahn routes to West Berlin. The long snouts of artillery poked above clumps of East German woods. Into Berlin flew Soviet Marshal Ivan Yakubovsky, the Warsaw Pact commander, to assume direction of some 500,000 Communist troops engaged in the exercise...
...lived and prospered despite its isolation inside Communist territory. The economic cost of accomplishing that feat is now getting higher and higher. Surrounded by bitterly hostile East Germany, the city (pop. 2,200,000) must bring in most of its food, fuel and raw materials through its air, rail, autobahn and canal lifelines with West Germany, 110 miles away. And to keep their $10 billion-a-year economy afloat under such circumstances, West Berliners have been forced to rely increasingly on powerful infusions of capital and outright subsidies from the West German government...
...sees a blue and white me dallion on a weasel-like grille barreling down upon him. And with good reason, for it is the emblem of the sleek five-seater produced by the Bayerische Motoren Werke. The BMW can outperform and overtake almost any standard German car on the autobahn. This year it proved that it could outdo its competitors in the market place as well: amidst a general economic slowdown and dwindling car sales in Germany, peppery little BMW is forging steadily ahead...
...symbolism and reality do not always coincide. Although the new bridge shortens the autobahn between Munich and West Berlin by 21 miles, it provides no link whatsoever between East and West Germany: the autobahn runs through a sealed corridor from which motorists cannot stray. Its inauguration, moreover, had to be accomplished without ceremony because the two governments refused to meet each other to open it. Bridge or no bridge, the truth is that the two Germanys seem to be drawing farther apart. For the first time since 1962, the Berlin Wall remained closed for Christmas this year: Bonn and Pankow...