Word: frontiers
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...frontier posts, abandoned, are being dismantled; police and customs officials have disappeared, and not even a speed bump slows traffic between the two Germanys. The Berlin Wall is all but gone, its absence a daily wonder. Most of the 108 streets blocked off in the city in 1961 have been reopened, all guards and controls removed. A drive along the old Wall trace is a journey in discovery: neighborhoods rejoined, old acquaintances renewed. Children frolic among the abandoned guard towers of the former death strip, the resident rabbits scampering for cover -- the only victims of unification. Traffic jams form...
...logistic marvel of supplying thousands of East German shops with Western products was brought off so smoothly and quietly that hardly anyone noticed. In the days before July 1, thousands of West German trucks rolled through the frontier posts, like so many military convoys, ferrying in goods most East Germans had only dreamed of. Used-car lots sprang up in small towns and along country roads hardly changed since the end of World War II -- time warp over and over again...
Admirably, the star-studded version that opened in New York City's Central Park last week solves the problem in a subtler way: by transposing the action to the Wild West of frontier days. The "Padua" of swinging-door saloons and semicorrupt sheriffs is recognizably not of our era, yet equally recognizably a precursor to it; thus the outrageous sexual politics onstage is not ours, but pertinent to it. Director A.J. Antoon has taken considerable liberties (one character is called Joe Bob), and he uses the setting as much for slapstick buffoonery as for literary insight. But the show...
...Tacitus, "either bristles with forests or reeks with swamps." Even then, German tribesmen had a reputation as fearsome fighters, and it was immensely important to the future history of Europe that they annihilated three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest in A.D. 9, leaving the Rhine as the frontier between the Roman and Germanic worlds. But it was the Romans who originally invaded those forests to "pacify" the Germans, as they had pacified Gaul and Britain...
...futures of the owl and the ancient forest it inhabits have become entwined in a common struggle for survival. Man's appetite for timber threatens to consume much of the Pacific Northwest's remaining wilderness, an ecological frontier whose deep shadows and jagged profile are all that remain of the land as it was before the impact of man. But rescuing the owl and the timeless forest may mean barring the logging industry from many tracts of virgin timberland, and that would deliver a jarring economic blow to scores of timber-dependent communities across Washington, Oregon and Northern California...