Word: east
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Thus West German leaders' advice to their compatriots from the East was an odd amalgam: We love you, and if you come, we will welcome you with open arms -- but really, we wish you would stay home. "Anyone who wants can come," said Mayor Momper, but added, "Please, even with all the understandable joy you must feel being able to come to the West, please do it tomorrow, do it the day after tomorrow. We are having trouble dealing with this." In Bonn, Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble warned would-be refugees that with a cold winter coming on, the country...
...reaction is another indication of how the sudden mellowing of the East German state and the crumbling of the Wall have taken the West by surprise. The West German government has done little or no planning to absorb the refugees: it has left the task of resettlement to states, cities and private charity. "There is no real contingency plan for reunification" either, admits a Kohl confidant. Only in recent days has a small group been assigned to examine the reunification question, and it has not even been given office space...
Much will depend, of course, on whether, and how soon, Krenz delivers on his rhetoric of freedom. The conviction that they will be able to decide their future could indeed keep at home most East Germans who are now tempted to flee; it is difficult to see anything else that might. Until the opening of the Wall, however, Krenz's reformist inclinations had seemed ambiguous. For many years he had been a faithful follower of Honecker's, and as recently as September defended the Chinese government's bloody suppression of pro- democracy demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. His conversion...
Thus, rhetorically at least, the opposition no longer gets an argument from the government. Gerhard Herder, East German Ambassador to the U.S., pledged reforms that "will radically change the structure and the way the G.D.R. will be governed. This development is irreversible. If there are still people alleging that all these changes are simply cosmetic, to grant the survival of the party, then let me say they are wrong...
...still locking people in, such talk might have been hard to believe. Today, with the barrier chipped, battered and permeable, it is a good deal easier to accept. In the end it does not matter whether Eastern Europe's Communists are reforming out of conviction or if, as one East German protest banner put it, THE PEOPLE LEAD -- THE PARTY LIMPS BEHIND. What does matter is that the grim, fearsome Wall, for almost three decades a marker for relentless oppression, has overnight become something far different, a symbol of the failure of regimentation to suppress the human yearning for freedom...