Word: berlin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Kramer's approach is not systematic, and the subjects of her six chapters are very specific: a restaurant in a bohemian district of West Berlin, an East German poet who spied on his friends for the secret police, the struggle over what kind of Holocaust memorial--if any--should be built in Berlin. Perhaps the most poignant and telling of the stories is the one about a young man whom Kramer calls Peter Schmidt, a drifting East German who tried to escape when the Wall still existed, was caught and imprisoned but was eventually sold to the West (the East...
...book offers many such pointed moments. Kramer quotes a West German after the Wall has come down, saying, "What can I possibly say to an East Berlin scientist who, after years of trying, finally gets permission to travel, and buys an old piece of western equipment for his lab, and spends a year rebuilding it, and is proud of it--and then scientists from the West arrive and say, 'This East German science is ridiculous,' and his lab is closed." In her chapter about the opening of the Stasi files, Kramer focuses on a poet, Alexander Anderson...
...find ways to simplify how the audience can receive this information." CBS News president Andrew Heyward sees another problem with the news explosion. "We seem to have lost a sense of proportion," he says. "Everything is made to seem equally important, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the latest scandal in Washington. We lack the vocabulary to convey the true importance of some events, because we're always moving on to the next thing. It serves to trivialize the news...
...knows many things," wrote the ancient Greek poet Archilochus, "but the hedgehog knows one big thing." In his famous 1953 essay, the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin used that conceit to divide Russian writers into hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs, he suggested, are individuals who relate everything to a single, all embracing principle, while foxes are those who see a multiplicity of things without fitting them into some universal system. (Dostoevsky was a hedgehog, Tolstoy a fox.) Berlin regarded this contrast as a profound philosophical difference that divided writers, thinkers and even politicians...
Rounding out the 23 are Sieglinde Lemke of the Freie Universitat, Berlin, Anita Patterson from the University of Illinois, Carl Pedersen from Odense University, James Smethurst from Harvard, Barbara L. Solow '45, an independent scholar, H. Lewis suggs from Clemson University, Michael West from the College of the Holy Cross and Lecturer in History and Literature Edward L. Widmer '84 of Harvard University...