Word: berlins
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This passage, from his childhood in Nazi Berlin, is originally from a lecture on "The Use of the Past" and is reprinted in his book of historical essays, Not By Fact Alone...
...grew up in Berlin, the son of middle-class German Jewish parents who were so "assimilated" that they couldn't believe that the Nazis would retain power for more than a few years, or were really serious about their anti-Semitic slogans; until shop windows were smashed, synagogues burned, and lawyers, doctors, and businessmen carted off by the thousands to concentration camps during and after the "Crystal Night" of November...
...that time I had already been sent away to boarding school in England, a decision taken by my parents when the secondary school I attended in Berlin, the Franzosische Gymnasium (traditionally under French influence and supposedly immune from anti-Jewish manifestations), forbade all "non-Aryan" boys and girls to join the annual school outing, a boating party on the river Spree. That had been too much for my mother, whose great pride and joy was that I, then a twelve-year-old, had indubitably earned the coveted privilege of entertaining cruise passengers on my concertina...
Gorbachev tries to head off his worst crisis, with the integrity of his country at stake. -- African wars envelop millions in famine and death. -- China's empty gesture. -- Voices of East Berlin...
...might have been delivered as fittingly in Warsaw, Budapest, East Berlin, Bucharest or Sofia. For while the changing of the calendar rarely signifies the change of much else, the advent of 1990 throughout Eastern Europe gave the sense that a corner had been turned, that the time for the celebration of a revolution was passing and the time for the painful work of political, economic and moral reconstruction had begun...