Word: german
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Schroeder is the author of a recent study about how little German youngsters today actually know about the GDR. He and his colleagues surveyed over 5,000 students aged between 15 and 17, and found that many, especially those actually living in areas that formed part of East Germany, have an extremely distorted view of the GDR. More than half of the respondents, for example, believe that the GDR was "not a dictatorship," and that the Stasi was an intelligence service like any other, deployed mostly against people of other countries rather than against its own citizens. The figures...
...know if I ever hit anyone, it was always dark," says a 50-year-old truck driver and occasional DJ who gives his name only as Hans-Holger. He is recalling the days when, as a 19-year-old border guard for the old German Democratic Republic, he was required to shoot at fellow citizens trying to flee to West Germany. Later, he himself served a 17-month prison sentence for attempting to escape the GDR. Still, he's nostalgic for the old East, which is why he's a regular at "Zur Firma," an East Berlin pub whose theme...
...Making light of a very dark past - "Ostalgia" as the phenomenon is known - has come into vogue in Berlin recent years. Visitors to the once divided German capital can browse souvenir stores selling "authentic" GDR memorabilia; stay at the "Ostel", a hostel decorated in GDR fashion; or take a "Trabi-safari," which involves a sightseeing tour in the notoriously rickety Trabant, ubiquitous passenger car of the GDR. Just last week, former Berlin Senator for Cultural Affairs Thomas Flierl denounced as "tasteless mockery" the service that allows tourists at the old "Checkpoint Charlie" crossing between the two sides of Berlin...
...lost its ranking as Germany's biggest mass-membership party, or Volkspartei, to Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU), with which it governs in an uneasy grand coalition. The SPD continues to lose supporters to the upstart Die Linke (The Left), a party made up of former east German communists and disaffected leftists from the west of the country. According to the latest polls, just 21% of Germans now say they would vote for the party of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt if an election were held tomorrow (compared to 37% for Merkel's CDU and 14% for Die Linke...
...years German politics was defined chiefly by the rivalry between the two big people's parties. The arrival of the Green Party in the 1980s and Die Linke in 2005 has divided the field, scattered voters, and made it harder to form a government at the state and federal level. The troubles of the SPD, as dramatically illustrated this weekend, suggest that Germany's political atomization is not over yet. With reporting by Ursula Sautter / Bonn