Word: juritza
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...East Berlin where the Hohenschönhausen jail stood. Germany's secret police, the Stasi, employed one officer for every 180 G.D.R. citizens and had a network of 180,000 informers. Those who fell foul of the system paid a heavy price. "This is not a museum," insists Cliewe Juritza as he leads a group through the former prison. "If you visit a Baroque palace, you ponder on times that are closed. These times are not closed...
...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...
...Symbol of Resilience These days juritza makes a living as a tour guide and one-man antidote to ostalgie. But the bulk of Berlin's tourist industry colludes in revisionism, selling Berlin's history to visitors in meaningless lumps, like the wall peckers hawking pieces of the Wall. Yet just as you despair that Germany will ever escape its conflicted sense of the past, the Wall trail crosses the River Spree, and symbols of the nation's astounding resilience come into view. The Reichstag, opened in 1894 when Germany was a young nation-state, and later burned as the Nazis...
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