Word: easts
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...anarchy, culture wars, environmentalism and pacifism. They are now safely on the road to embourgeoisement, and no wonder: the bulk of their supporters - teachers, social workers, the "caring classes" - are employed by the state. Next to go was the hard left, Die Linke, an amalgam of former East German communists and West German leftists who could not stomach the reformism of Schröder when he led the SPD. In some regional elections in former East Germany, Die Linke has moved ahead of the Social Democrats. (Read: "Busting Out: German Pol Plays the Cleavage Card...
Graveyards are usually about endings. But in December 1961 Waltraud Niebank embarked on a new life in East Berlin's Pankow Cemetery. She might have been mistaken for a young widow as she scanned the headstones, although in truth, her husband was alive. He was living in West Berlin and Niebank had been separated from him for four months. Now she was looking for a concealed tunnel which would reunite them. Soon after their wedding, the cemetery had been divided by a cinder-block barrier, part of a fortification some 100 miles (160 km) in length which would eventually...
...dance classes. She could have slipped west to join him but she decided to apply for permission to leave the G.D.R. The wedding took place on Aug. 5, 1961; her exit permit was to be granted 10 days later. But during the early hours of Aug. 13, the East German army ringed West Berlin with barbed wire and armed guards. The Wall had been built...
...side, and lines of olive green and turquoise blue Trabant cars. Finally the numbers forced the authorities to open the gates. Niebank's brother was among the throng and came looking for her. "There was such celebration," she recalls, "over every Trabi that drove through." (Read: "Is the Trabi, East Germany's Clunker, On the Comeback...
...toilets - are Easterners or immigrants. Yet there's also been a striking geographical reversal. The poorly paid and the unemployed were shunted into the high-rises of Wedding, in the west, as rich Berliners swooped on the elegant 19th century housing of Prenzlauer Berg, left to crumble in the East during the Cold War era, now lavishly restored. It's similar along the edge of the neighboring district of Mitte, the focus of the city's bar and restaurant culture. West Berlin was catnip to avant-garde artists, musicians and filmmakers from all over the world; its population swelled still...