Word: dieter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...business administration; he is now an executive with Mercedes-Benz. After wondering whether to attend university at all, Poeck moved into engineering and an eventual partnership in a consulting firm. He spent several years working in Asia and Africa, where he thinks he can contribute more than at home. Dieter Klussmeyer studied law on his way to the civil service post of district draft-board chief in his hometown. Only Werner Marker, an ophthalmologist, and Klaus Giersiepen, a lawyer, were certain of their career plans...
...outrageously expensive. G&M, a mail-order house in Bavaria, caters specifically to such tastes, offering a catalog of 273 "carefully selected luxury gifts," with a total value of $26.5 million; among them are a Tabriz rug for $964,000 and a gold-plated record player for $75,000. Dieter Schiwietz, a Hamburg plastic surgeon, says women -- and men -- seem to be having no trouble finding money for face-lifts costing up to $70,000. Says Schiwietz: "Looking good is an important part of the good life...
...Dieter, the revolution has been a betrayal. He says he feels let down both by the old-party Stalinists who "misused us as tools for their private purposes" and by his superiors. "Most of them grabbed state pensions and disappeared," he says. "They have little people like me to bear their burdens...
Though the Stasis propped up an unpopular Communist regime for more than four decades and were notorious for their disregard of privacy and occasional beatings of prisoners, Dieter cannot understand why so much loathing is aimed his way. He insists he was only a maintenance man in a Stasi center, a mere speck in an elaborate organization that not only offered full-time employment to 85,000 people but also provided pocket money to a network of 109,000 citizens who snooped on their neighbors and co-workers...
Unlike most of his former colleagues, Dieter has found work -- this time as a regular policeman in East Berlin. He has started walking a beat, and earns a monthly wage of 1,600 East German marks, which is worth about $330 in buying power and is almost equal to his Stasi pay. (A few former agents have even found employment as policemen in West Germany.) But Dieter has lost a packet of coveted perks, among them paid vacations at choice resorts along the Baltic coast. Because the Stasis were in a special category set apart from the typical East German...