Word: berliner
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Berlin Wall, which has served so often as a backdrop for human suffering, last week witnessed a very different sort of scene. From the divided city's Western sector, they came on foot by the thousands-old people struggling with sacks full of presents, small children carrying freshly cut roses or tulips, young mothers pushing prams, men lugging thick suitcases. Alternately smiling and weeping for joy, the visitors trudged past the tank traps, the death strip, the watchtowers. Finally, after clearing the last checkpoint, they rushed to meet friends and relatives whose faces some of them had almost forgotten...
...Berliners, West and East alike, it was indeed a beautiful day. For the first time in six years, the Wall-the concrete monstrosity that divides the city -was opened for visitors from West Berlin. The East German regime of Party Boss Erich Honecker had granted three-day Easter passes to West Berliners as an illustration of the freer access that will be allowed after the Big Four agreement on the city is put into action. Although it was a one-way deal -no East Berliners were allowed to visit the Western sector-West Berlin's Mayor Klaus Schiitz praised...
...West Berliners stepped into a city that in many ways was as strange to them as Warsaw or Moscow might be. The new showcase sections of East Berlin, with their large lifeless squares and sterile Marxist-modern, glass-sheathed buildings, impressed many of the visitors as utterly foreign. Visiting food shops and department stores, West Berliners were struck by the high prices (coffee $10 per lb., a cotton dress $38, a small refrigerator $496). Some West Berliners clearly felt a sense of unease in being surrounded by the battalions of gray-uniformed Vopos (People's Police) and green-suited...
Meanwhile, on the autobahns linking West Berlin with West Germany -frequently the scene of long delays and harassment-the East Germans temporarily put into effect new access arrangements that had been worked out as part of the Berlin agreement. Border formalities were reduced from an average 30 minutes to only five or ten. No one was required to get out of autos or to submit to a search. As a test of the new East German attitude, one driver openly displayed copies of a West German military magazine and a Hamburg sex tabloid on the front seat...
There are other rawly juxtaposed scenes: smiling French stars like Danielle Darrieux heading for Berlin to make films for the conquerors; an SS general being cordially greeted in Paris. Such things reveal one edge of Director Marcel Ophuls' purpose: anti-heroics. He tries to puncture the bourgeois myth-or protectively askew memory-that allows France generally to act as if hardly any Frenchmen collaborated with the Germans. The Sorrow and the Pity does that with a vengeance, but the bare facts of such an expose are hardly news. Happily, Ophuls, the son of noted Director Max Ophuls, also...