Word: berlin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Berlin. What a garrison of spies! what a playground for every alchemist, miracle worker and rat-piper that ever took up the cloak...
...these espionage novels, impudent crimes were committed on both sides of the Berlin Wall. There was a peculiar similarity to the sunless corridors and bureaucratic fatigue of Moscow and Washington. Enemies became interdependent and sometimes indistinguishable; it was a case of the left hand strengthening the right. George Smiley in Britain needed his rival Karla in Moscow. NATO needed the Warsaw Pact. The CIA needed the KGB. And the spy novelists needed them...
...sooner had the Berlin Wall fallen than it became obvious that there were other barriers for many former East Germans to overcome. Isolated from the world, trained to distrust everyone unlike themselves, alienated German youths lashed out in a fit of xenophobia. Often their targets were workers imported by the communist regime from other Marxist countries, like Angola and Vietnam, but sometimes they were simply anyone of another race...
...forcing two Namibians off a fourth-floor balcony and critically injuring them. Two weeks ago, 50 skinheads stormed a center for asylum seekers from the Third World, smashing windows and pummeling residents. No one with a dark skin, police officials say, can feel safe on the streets of eastern Berlin...
...surge in hate crimes in eastern Germany occurred just as the 1.6 million Turks in western Germany were becoming accepted. There is no longer widespread anti-Turkish prejudice, says Barbara John, the Berlin commissioner for foreigners. "The contrary is true," she says. "West Germans have taken to defending the Turks against antiforeign slander coming from the east...