Word: germanically
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...Whether or not to include the G.D.R. guards is just one more example of the difficulty that Germans still have with their history. For much of the period after World War II, both the G.D.R. and West Germany resisted serious examination of their collective culpability for Nazism. In the West, that denial poisoned relations between the generations, infusing Germany's student and counterculture movements with an anger not matched in other countries. A similar failure to confront the truth about the G.D.R. - its violent repression and the extent to which East Germans accepted and sometimes aided the regime - expresses itself...
...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...
...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 further as young West German men moved to the city to avoid the military service that was compulsory in the rest of the country. But today East is cooler than West. "That's where people with money want to live," says Klausmeier. "Now there's a social border in place of the physical one. It continues...
...Berlin Wall memorial. Plans have been drawn up to add a secular shrine to the victims of the Wall with their portraits embedded in a "window of memory." The list of 136 victims includes eight G.D.R. border guards: two deserters shot by their comrades and six killed by West German police protecting escapees. To exclude them, says Klausmeier, would ignore the extent to which East Germans were coerced by the state. (See pictures of East Germany making light of its dark past...
...Juritza, born in 1966, was captured, age 18, during his third escape attempt. One of 72,000 East Germans incarcerated for trying to leave their country, he served 10 months, suffering physical and psychological torture, before his freedom was bought by the West German government. (The G.D.R. earned hard currency and rid itself of dissidents by literally selling thousands of political prisoners.) Yet some Ossis still think Juritza and his fellow prisoners deserved their punishment. He tells of falling into conversation with an old man on a Berlin street. When Juritza mentioned his stint in jail, the old man erupted...