Word: berlins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Meeting at East Berlin's Dynamo Football Club Gymnasium, the 2,714 delegates overwhelmingly nominated as party leader Gregor Gysi, a reformist lawyer who at 41 becomes the youngest Communist boss in Eastern Europe. Only three months ago, Gysi came under withering attack by hard-liners for representing the opposition group New Forum in its bid for legal status. Now, said Gysi after winning election, the Communists in East Germany will be merely "one party among others...
Some citizens seemed determined to take matters into their own hands. In one incident, about 100 people halted a man who was leaving an East Berlin office of the dreaded Stasi (secret police) with two suitcases in tow. When the man was handed over to the police, they discovered currency worth hundreds of thousands of dollars that was believed to be intended for party officials. Two days later the man was found hanged in his jail cell. The 25,000-man Stasi, meanwhile, was partly defanged by the dismissal of its directorate and the reassignment of some 7,000 agents...
...plundering on a scale to rival world-class pillagers of national treasuries like the Marcos family of the Philippines or the Pahlavis of Iran. Honecker, along with other top party officials, lived a decidedly bourgeois life inside the walled luxury compound of Wandlitz, a few miles north of East Berlin. But last week it was revealed that he also had a $1.2 million vacation villa on the tiny island of Vilm in the Baltic Sea, previously thought to be an uninhabited bird preserve. Some of the perks claimed by East Germany's elite had a style reminiscent of ward pols...
...millions of dollars' worth of hard currency. The proceeds came from the illegal sale of arms, artworks and other goods. The affair has become known as the Ko-Ko scandal, after the office of Kommerzielle Koordination, through which the funds were funneled. Last week Schalck-Golodkowski surfaced in West Berlin, offering to return some of the funds and promising to fight any attempt by East Germany to have him extradited. Crimes involving hard currency are especially offensive to ordinary East Germans, who blame its scarcity for much of their economic hardship over the years...
Anyone who takes in the atmosphere along the perforated Berlin Wall today, declared Moisi, should be able to discern -- by the body language of the Volkspolizei on the Eastern side and the Berlin police on the Western side -- an extraordinary and palpable tug of togetherness. "The citizens of the German Democratic Republic really have a feeling of humiliation about being second-class citizens ((compared with their Western counterparts)), and that feeling can be ameliorated only by reunification." Opposing that process, suggested Moisi, would ultimately cause more problems than it would solve...