Word: berlins
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...feet high and 28 miles long and cuts a historic city into two wounded worlds. More than a barrier made of concrete, it is a powerful symbol of the cold war tensions that continue to divide East and West. It is the Berlin Wall, the place where rival political and economic systems come together but cannot meet, and this month is the 25th anniversary of its erection. "In the beginning it was just a wall," says Peter Werner, 49, a designer- architect who lives in West Berlin. "Then they made it more and more perfect with an inner wall...
Whatever it is called, the Wall appears to Berliners on both sides as a palpable presence that divides friends, families and neighborhoods. A quarter- century ago, East German soldiers and laborers worked through the night to lay down a crude barrier of cinder blocks, mortar and barbed wire. The resulting barricade gave graphic meaning to the political division of Berlin that had been imposed by Moscow in 1948, sundering the local population and leaving occupying U.S., French and British troops on the western side while the Soviets controlled the east. "In August 1961 the curtain was drawn aside to show...
...wasn't a movie, but it probably will be. As he told it, Heinz Braun, an East Berlin tire salesman, last week painted his auto to resemble a Soviet patrol car, dressed himself and three mannequins in Red Army uniforms, and coolly drove through a Berlin Wall checkpoint to West Berlin. Wolfgang Quasner, 45, a West Berliner who claims to have helped more than 1,000 East European refugees in the past 20 years, identified himself as the mastermind. % Quasner said he and confederates photographed Soviet army patrols and then had uniforms made. They smuggled the mannequins and attire...
...striving to dismantle some of the stifling legacy of state enterprise created by former Dictator Juan Peron. Communist nations are making efforts too. In Eastern Europe, small but thriving outposts of free enterprise continue to exist amid the suffocating state presence. Half the wurst and baked goods in East Berlin come from the private sector...
East and West Germany were ensnarled last week in the kind of case that makes the two countries the spy center of Europe. The main character was Herbert Meissner, 59, a leading East German economist, who was discovered shoplifting a bathroom fixture in West Berlin. After requesting to speak with West German federal intelligence service officials, Meissner signed statements declaring that he had been spying for East Berlin since 1978, and sought to defect to the West on his own free will...