Word: berliner
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...WHEN the Berlin Wall effectively came crumbling down over a week ago, the reforms in East Germany suddenly became more than an abstract political issue. No longer were the decisions of a few leaders the center of attention. No longer were political junkies the only ones interested in the reforms. Now we could all relate to what was going on, by focusing on the personal experiences of ordinary Berliners...
...Brandenburg Gate as theentrance into "bourgeois society." The world is not so centered as that, though. Admittedly, "bourgeois" is one of the world's vaguer words, but it nonetheless seems to me that Johnston Gate in Harvard Yard has a lot in common with the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. They're both gateways into a sort of bourgeois way of life...
...mean that leaving Harvard Yard and entering the consumeristic picnic of Harvard Square is analogous to leaving East Berlin for the West. I have the other direction in mind. Entering the Yard to become a Harvard student is analogous to walking through the Wall to West Berlin: it's a way of becoming bourgeois, even if the process here is not so shockingly immediate...
Images of the violation recur. When Berliners in the Soviet-run sector woke on the morning of Aug. 13, 1961, to find families sundered and the city rived by barbed wire -- and soon concrete -- many frantically sought routes of escape. The Berlin Wall was meant to halt a tide of migrants to the West that had left East Germany short of workers and threatened the stability of the Communist regime: more than 2.7 million had departed since the founding of the German Democratic Republic in 1949, 30,000 in July 1961 alone...
...Wall. In their jagged sprints, dodging searchlight beams and bullets, they created a theater of longing where the value of freedom -- and the maleficence of its denial -- found an extraordinary visual expression. In 1962, in one of the most publicized instances, 18-year-old Peter Fechter, an East Berlin bricklayer, was cut down by machine-gun fire as he tried to scale the Wall and, in plain view of Western policemen and reporters, was left lying for an hour while he bled to death; finally East German border guards retrieved his body. Fechter was one of an estimated...