Word: kurfurstendamm
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...Soviet soldier from a base in Elstal, west of Berlin, had decided to cool off by taking his ACRV M-1974 artillery-command and reconnaissance vehicle for a spin. About 16 miles down the road, he rumbled into what was formerly West Berlin and headed down the fashionable Kurfurstendamm, hitting several cars -- though no people. As the soldier was attempting to return to his garrison, a Soviet sergeant stopped him with a distinctly low-tech ploy: he hopped onto the carrier and threw a blanket over the vehicle's windshield...
...minutes earlier, on the Kurfurstendamm in West Berlin, I had encountered one of the few East Berliners who spoke enthusiastically to me of a single, reunified German state. He was a young man in his 20s, strolling with friends whose plastic shopping bags (embossed with Michael Jackson's picture) were filled with purchases. He wanted to move to the West (nearly 1,800 people a day are still moving) as soon as possible, he said. Why? He gestured to the store windows and the bright lights and said, "My eyes have been opened...
Many of the visitors pushed on to the Kurfurstendamm, West Berlin's boulevard of fancy stores, smart cafes and elegant hotels, to see prosperity at first hand. At 3 a.m., the street was a cacophony of honking horns and happily shouting people; at 5 some were still sitting in hotel lobbies, waiting for dawn. One group was finishing off a bottle of champagne in the lobby of the Hotel Am Zoo, chatting noisily. "We're going back, of course," said a woman at the table. "But we must wait to see the stores open. We must see that...
...road, while factories in Bremen and other cities were forced to reduce their output. West Berlin was the hardest-hit area. For two days pollution alerts were broadcast hourly on local radio and television stations, and some West Berliners looked like surgeons as they wandered along the fashionable Kurfurstendamm, the city's famed boulevard, wearing antismog masks...
...Checkpoint Charlie, the hideous maw of the Berlin Wall gapes briefly, affording a narrow passage into the divided German soul. On its Western side, a sea of sensuous color rushes down the Kurfurstendamm, past the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, and spends itself violently but impotently in a scatological orgy of graffiti against the cold barrier. On the Eastern side, a pall hangs over the city, reflected in the rigorously functional, regimented gray apartment blocks that line the streets. Propelled by the engine of the postwar Wirtschaftswunder, the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany is a sporty blond racing...