Word: berlins
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...residential high-rises. "The West was flaunting what it could do, building these state-of-the-art apartments right next to the Wall," says Axel Klausmeier, an architectural historian who heads the foundation responsible for conserving and commemorating the Wall and its history. Today, as the trail wends through Berlin, you notice that people in low-status jobs - sweeping streets, cleaning toilets - are Easterners or immigrants. Yet there's also been a striking geographical reversal. The poorly paid and the unemployed were shunted into the high-rises of Wedding, in the west, as rich Berliners swooped on the elegant 19th...
...mental border, too. When the earthmovers arrived at Bernauerstrasse, a Lutheran pastor called Manfred Fischer confronted them, arms outstretched. His intervention saved the substantial chunk of the Wall along the Wedding-Mitte border that today forms the core of the Berlin Wall memorial. Plans have been drawn up to add a secular shrine to the victims of the Wall with their portraits embedded in a "window of memory." The list of 136 victims includes eight G.D.R. border guards: two deserters shot by their comrades and six killed by West German police protecting escapees. To exclude them, says Klausmeier, would ignore...
...There used to be a blank space on maps of East Berlin where the Hohenschönhausen jail stood. Germany's secret police, the Stasi, employed one officer for every 180 G.D.R. citizens and had a network of 180,000 informers. Those who fell foul of the system paid a heavy price. "This is not a museum," insists Cliewe Juritza as he leads a group through the former prison. "If you visit a Baroque palace, you ponder on times that are closed. These times are not closed...
...bought by the West German government. (The G.D.R. earned hard currency and rid itself of dissidents by literally selling thousands of political prisoners.) Yet some Ossis still think Juritza and his fellow prisoners deserved their punishment. He tells of falling into conversation with an old man on a Berlin street. When Juritza mentioned his stint in jail, the old man erupted in fury. "Someone forgot to kill you," he said...
...pictures of the Berlin Wall...