Word: germanic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...newly surfaced details of U.S. branch accounts are a small slice of what the Swiss banks held, since they only represent funds transferred to New York City by fearful Europeans. After the war began, the U.S. Government froze the American accounts of people living in German-occupied territory in order to keep the money out of Nazi hands. The Swiss Bank Corp. list, recently declassified along with other wartime secrets, had originally been handed over to the U.S. by the bank in 1941. Similar records were submitted by the New York City offices of Credit Suisse and the Swiss-America...
...perceptive, engaging, but ultimately frustrating new book, The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany (Random House; 293 pages; $27.50), Jane Kramer, who writes the "Letter from Europe" column for the New Yorker, addresses the question of how the former West Germans and the former East Germans are adjusting to each other. She finds wariness and disappointment; they are making an edgy acceptance of unity without much enthusiasm. "As far as 'mentality' goes," Kramer writes, paraphrasing the thoughts of one German, "the Wall is very high in Germany, and will still be high in ten or twenty...
Kramer's approach is not systematic, and the subjects of her six chapters are very specific: a restaurant in a bohemian district of West Berlin, an East German poet who spied on his friends for the secret police, the struggle over what kind of Holocaust memorial--if any--should be built in Berlin. Perhaps the most poignant and telling of the stories is the one about a young man whom Kramer calls Peter Schmidt, a drifting East German who tried to escape when the Wall still existed, was caught and imprisoned but was eventually sold to the West (the East...
...book offers many such pointed moments. Kramer quotes a West German after the Wall has come down, saying, "What can I possibly say to an East Berlin scientist who, after years of trying, finally gets permission to travel, and buys an old piece of western equipment for his lab, and spends a year rebuilding it, and is proud of it--and then scientists from the West arrive and say, 'This East German science is ridiculous,' and his lab is closed." In her chapter about the opening of the Stasi files, Kramer focuses on a poet, Alexander Anderson...
Drexel, a German shepherd owned by Ram Hannan, the co-owner of Maximum, bounds up the stairs to the half pipe platform to announce the arrival of his owner, who's clad in a white sleeveless T-shirt that accentuates the tattoo running down his entire left...