Word: berlin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...last French invasion was the invasion of another idea: revolution. When Paris mobs overthrew King Louis-Philippe in 1848, radicals and nationalists all over Europe took heart. The Italians rose against their Habsburg overlords; and even in dormant Germany, crowds began marching through the streets of Berlin, Vienna, Dresden. The armies of Germany's princes eventually suppressed these demonstrations, but not before liberals organized a constituent assembly, which met in Frankfurt and drafted an all-German constitution. The legislators decided that they could put their ideas into practice only by offering the crown of a united Germany to King Frederick...
...members of the confederation still met in Frankfurt, and the Habsburg delegates still exerted unofficial leadership, but the young Prussian delegate determined that this must be changed. "Before very long," Bismarck wrote back to Berlin, 'we shall have to fight for our lives against Austria . . . because the progress of events in Germany has no other issue." Prussia's King William I appointed Bismarck Minister-President in 1862, and within four years, Bismarck was ready for a showdown with Austria. Prussia's chief of staff, Count Helmuth von Moltke, had revived the army of Frederick the Great, making it once again...
...last pre-Hitler elections in November of 1932, the Nazis lost strength, from 230 seats to 196. The party was an estimated $5 million in debt, unable to pay the storm troopers who fought its street battles. "The future looks dark and gloomy," the Nazi party chief for Berlin, Joseph Goebbels, wrote in his diary at the start of 1933. "All chances and hopes have quite disappeared...
...Germany itself, there are still observers capable of taking the future a little less seriously. One of the cleverest is the novelist and critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger, whose latest book, Europe, Europe, includes a scene in which an American reporter visits Berlin in the year 2006. He finds himself in the midst of an environmental conference being conducted in the traditional Berlin style. "Masked demonstrators from the eco-anarchist milieu clashed with officers of the environmental police. A representative of the chemical industry, who made profuse ritual protestations of humility and reassurance, was shouted down." Going to look...
Having fled over the Wall in 1976, Nina Hagen discovered the brave new world of punk music. Hagen, 35, learned her craft by singing along to tapes of Tina Turner and Janis Joplin, "although I couldn't speak a word of English." She got started in East Berlin's jazz circuit and has since emerged as an international rock star. Meantime, she has made more changes than Madonna, festooning herself with chains and wearing metal bras, wild wigs and ghoulish makeup. On her latest album, Hagen pounds out a number titled Gorbachev Rap. After all, she explains, it's important...