Word: berliner
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...Symbol of Resilience These days juritza makes a living as a tour guide and one-man antidote to ostalgie. But the bulk of Berlin's tourist industry colludes in revisionism, selling Berlin's history to visitors in meaningless lumps, like the wall peckers hawking pieces of the Wall. Yet just as you despair that Germany will ever escape its conflicted sense of the past, the Wall trail crosses the River Spree, and symbols of the nation's astounding resilience come into view. The Reichstag, opened in 1894 when Germany was a young nation-state, and later burned as the Nazis...
...That Germany has achieved so much in such a relatively short period after reunification - stability, democracy, prosperity - paradoxically highlights its failings, the sections of society that have been excluded from the success story. Berlin has memorials everywhere, the earnest expression of modern Germany's desire to acknowledge its difficult history. Yet for every memorial, there's also a theme-park rendition of the past. At Potsdamer Platz you can have your picture taken with smiling "border guards" next to remounted Wall panels, decorated with faux graffiti on their eastern faces. "It's disgusting," says Knabe. "And it makes harmless something...
...Nowhere has history been more thoroughly defanged than at Checkpoint Charlie, the famous crossing at Friedrichstrasse that has mutated into a kind of G.D.R. funfair. Tourists jostle for ice cream at the Kalter Krieg (Cold War) parlor, buy Russian hats and I ♥ BERLIN T shirts, and pose at a reconstruction of the American military post. "Cool," says a teenage visitor to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, inspecting a VW Beetle with a secret compartment for smuggling human cargo. "Reunification was really great," says Alexandra, a 15-year-old from southwestern Germany, as she browses in the museum's gift shop...
...Such laments are common among older Ossis. They get short shrift from Niebank. Life after she settled in West Berlin didn't prove easy - she divorced in 1970. She has worked hard and dutifully shelled out her "solidarity taxes" to lift the eastern German economy. "We had to pay for the East," she says, "but they're full of envy." Young Germans, she says, have moved on. "My sons have absolutely no interest in history. They've never asked me about how I survived the war and they're not interested in the Wall," says Niebank. "Young people think...
...Ironically, Hilmi Kaya Turan, a leading member of Germany's Turkish community, has fond memories of trips to the G.D.R. Turkish guest workers from West Berlin found that a handful of hard cash ensured they were treated like kings by the Ossis. These days Turan counsels the long-term unemployed. Among the 200,000 Berliners of Turkish origin - many live in districts along the old course of the Wall - joblessness, which averages 14% across the city, hovers around 50%. There's yet another irony there. "Turks came here to work," says Turan. "We were Gastarbeiter - guest workers. And there...