Word: berlins
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...change was transforming the world. Except in China, where troops mowed down students demonstrating for democracy in Tiananmen Square last spring, nation after nation saw crowds peacefully marching in the streets, and governments peacefully, if grudgingly, giving way. We want freedom!, the crowds chanted in Warsaw, Budapest, East Berlin, Sofia, Prague. One by one, the rejected leaders of the former Soviet satellites, abandoned by Moscow, promised free elections -- and more or less faded into oblivion. The Berlin Wall came tumbling down; the cold war ended. And only last week history was further rewritten when Czechoslovakia's onetime reformer Alexander Dubcek...
...East Germans flooded into Hungary by the thousands, tensions between the two supposedly "fraternal" governments came into the open. Invoking a bilateral agreement, the East Berlin regime demanded that Budapest return the refugees. The Hungarians refused, allowing 15,000 East Germans in three days to go to West Germany, where they received automatic citizenship. East Germany halted travel to Hungary. Would-be immigrants then poured into Czechoslovakia to take refuge in the West German embassy there...
Gorbachev had played a pivotal role in heading off bloodshed. Visiting East Berlin on Oct. 7, the 40th anniversary of the communist state, Gorbachev cautioned the leaders that they could not count on Soviet support if they used force to crack down, and advised them to launch their own perestroika: "Life itself punishes those who delay." Eleven days later, Honecker was forced out and replaced by Krenz, who immediately sought to appease the marching crowds and the demands from his party for faster reform. His tenure was brief but memorable, if only because he ordered the opening of the Berlin...
...last year the Trabi suddenly became a vessel for revolution and liberty. First the car ferried cheering, champagne-drinking East German refugees to the West. Then, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, joyous citizens of the Democratic Republic stuffed themselves into their Trabis and poured through border crossings for shopping sprees and dreams of reunification. The Trabant became the car a country rode to freedom. By all rights, it should be hailed as the little engine that could. But it really can't. In this fable, the ugly duckling finds love but stays ugly...
...border towns residents complain of Trabi traffic jams every weekend as East Germans drive in for shopping. A study by Berlin's Technical University has shown that Trabants spew roughly nine times as many hydrocarbons and five times as much carbon monoxide as most other cars in Western Europe. Though some West Germans refer to the Trabi's distinctive mix of gas and oil smoke as "the smell of freedom," others are more direct. They call the Trabi the "little stinker...