Word: germanize
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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...
...Niebank hovered by an open grave, a voice from below said "Jump," so she did, then scrabbled through the passage toward the husband who waited for her in the West. She still chokes with fear and anger at the memory of what she endured to leave the German Democratic Republic (G.D.R.). "It was so painful," she says. "I never wanted to look at the Wall again." (See pictures of the Berlin Wall...
...together to weather the worst economic downturn in 70 years; it did not. Germany, to be sure, has contributed 4,000 troops to the NATO mission in Afghanistan. And yet there is deepening unease in Germany about the nation's involvement in the war there. That is partly because German troops are killing and being killed in greater numbers as violence rises. But there seems to be an underlying concern, too, as if such visible engagement in global geopolitics is somehow dangerously unsettling to the good life that Germans have come to expect...
...strongest impulse in German politics is to avoid big changes, to hold the country steady as she goes. The electoral system supports such an impulse by producing consensus-driven coalition governments. It's pretty safe to assume that whatever coalition emerges from the election, it will not include Die Linke, a hard-left party formed by Western socialists and remnants of the G.D.R. communists. But Die Linke's likely decent performance in the eastern states also speaks to promise unfulfilled. Ossis - Easterners - vote differently from Wessis - Westerners - because they still perceive their interests as being different. Ossis earn less, produce...
...Nowhere is Germany's obstinate gulf - a division that Germans call "a wall in the head" - more evident than in Berlin. The physical Wall has been all but expunged. In 1989, Mauerspechte - wall peckers - chipped out and sold pieces of the concrete from the Wall's graffiti-strewn western face; later, municipalities sent diggers to do the job more thoroughly. Like a clumsily retouched image, the Wall was airbrushed out of the picture. But its shadow remains, and with it other fractures in German society: generational fissures, cracks between communities that benefited from the fall of the Wall and those...