Word: berlins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Americans and Germans alike remember well the day in 1963 when a visiting U.S. President, John Kennedy, gave voice to his feelings about the two-year- old Wall that ran like a jagged scar through Berlin: "Ich bin ein Berliner." His message was more than a metaphoric statement of solidarity with the people of that divided city. It was an appeal to the Wall's Communist architects to tear down the 26-mile-long concrete monstrosity. Today the Wall continues to pierce the hearts of Berliners every bit as effectively as its pipes, barbed wires and other sharp obstacles once...
...Wall is stripped of political significance, it still serves a purpose by applying a brake to refugee traffic. An East German official predicts that once free travel wipes out border barriers, about 1.5 million of the country's 16.6 million citizens might head West. Without the Wall, West Berlin will bear the brunt of that great rush. But West Berlin's workers already resent the city's shortages of jobs and housing and the heavy concentration of alien guest workers from Turkey and ethnic Germans from the East bloc. Ironically, unless the burden of a new influx is properly shared...
...weekend Czechoslovakia flung open its Western border to let the growing flood pass unhindered into West Germany. Those who stayed behind stepped up the mass demonstrations for reform that have dogged President Egon Krenz from the moment he took office three weeks ago. Hundreds of thousands marched through East Berlin on Saturday calling for change. In many major cities tens of thousands attended open-air meetings with government and party leaders to vent their complaints and demands. In Moscow Krenz sought to cool the reform fever raging through his country by paying polite compliments to the perestroika that East German...
...true, that is a heady promise for a country that barely a month ago still cowered under one of the most monolithic and authoritarian of Communist regimes. The transformation east of the Wall has already been dramatic, indeed incredible: Who could have imagined East Berlin's Communist Party boss, mayor and police chief standing on the steps of city hall for five hours, listening patiently to criticisms that would once have been considered virtually treasonable...
...American, British and Soviet leaders met at Yalta at a time when the Red Army had liberated most of Eastern Europe from Hitler's troops and were poised to take Berlin. Although the ailing Roosevelt knew that the U.S. could soon assault Japan with the first atom bomb, his top military advisers doubted that its use would be immediately decisive. An American priority at Yalta was to ensure Japan's quick defeat by persuading Stalin to join the Far East conflict once Germany surrendered...