Word: berlins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...euphoria of the moment has not removed all the reminders of how it was until very recently. On the route to Friedrichstrasse, a main Berlin crossing point, the subway train glides through two empty stations bricked up since 1961, when the Wall rose. The platforms are bare, eerily lighted by a few dusty neon tubes. East German border guards have learned to replace their studied sullenness of old with the occasional smile, but West Germans and others still must file through cattle-chute-like passport control points, and are made to exchange 25 deutsche marks ($13.50) for East German marks...
Perhaps the most cogent explanation for G.D.R. loyalty is that the existing state insulates the people against the shock of the outside world. "We look at the West, and it's a fairyland," says an East Berlin housewife. "Our attitudes are different. We grew up more modest. We missed out on a lot, but we make do. Over there it's all money, money, money. We don't have it." There , is the touch of an inferiority complex as well, and given widespread West German complaints about new burdens, it is perhaps justified. "Maybe it's best not to unify...
Reunification is not on the current agenda -- not on East Berlin's nor on Bonn's. Certainly not reunification as old-fashioned nationalists still imagine it: a kind of anschluss of the G.D.R. by West Germany. "We did not throw off the Soviets to become a colony of the West," says Peter Grimm, a dissident writer...
...sometimes a tide that can sweep in the most profound changes. The people of Eastern Europe sense just such a tide washing over them now, a political swell that has already propelled Solidarity to power in Poland, transformed Communism to socialism in Hungary and punched through the Wall in Berlin. Last week the irresistible tide reached Bulgaria and even pounded at the entrenched Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Men and women across the full breadth of the East bloc were attempting to catch the wave, aware that it must be done before a historic opportunity is lost...
...accepted wisdom among Western and Czechoslovak experts that if the legitimacy of the 1968 invasion were ever officially questioned, it would be the Jakes regime's death warrant. This week East Germany's Communist Party chief Egon Krenz will be in Prague for a visit with Jakes. Sources in Berlin intimate that Krenz will try to persuade the Czechoslovak leader to drop his hard line. The trip, said East German Foreign Minister Oskar Fischer, may just have a "stimulating effect...