Word: leipzig
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...cannot decommunize a whole society overnight," says Friedrich Magirius, superintendent of Leipzig's Protestant churches, who notes that East Germany was "a typical dictatorship in which anybody who wanted to achieve something, to climb professionally, had to adapt." Hans Meyer, a law professor at the University of Frankfurt, argues that in East Germany the line between victim and criminal was perilously thin. "Very often," he says, "a person will have resisted in one respect but helped the regime in another...
...does more than degrade the quality of life; it cripples and shortens the lives of human beings. Illnesses traceable to pollution consume more than 13% of Hungary's health budget; at least 1 out of 17 Hungarian deaths stems from environmental causes. Around the East German industrial center of Leipzig, life expectancy is six years less than the national average. In the nearby town of Espenhain, 4 out of 5 children develop chronic bronchitis or heart ailments by the age of seven. Children in northern Bohemia, the heart of Czechoslovakia's industrial region, are taken out of the area...
...major source of the pollution is the relentless burning of soft, brown high-sulfur coal, called lignite, which is the basic fuel of the East bloc. On cold winter days in Leipzig, the yellow-brown smog emitted by coal-fired power plants is so thick that drivers are forced to turn on their headlights during the day. In the triangle comprising southern Poland and northern Czechoslovakia, which is covered by a permanent cloud of emissions from factories and power plants, residents complain that the air is so bad that washed clothes turn dirty before they can dry on the line...
...musicians. Neither a disciplinarian nor one of the boys, Masur favors a let-us-reason- together approach that prizes loyalty and enthusiasm over virtuosity. Not surprisingly, his repertoire is centered on the classics from Mozart to Mahler, which he conducts with short punchy gestures, usually without a baton. In Leipzig he led as many as 90 performances a year, including a healthy dollop of new music, mostly commissioned from East German composers. Says Masur: "I always told our audiences, 'You read not only Goethe and Schiller but contemporary writers as well, so you should expect the same in music...
Kurt Masur, conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus and a leader in last year's peaceful revolution, is named music director of the Philharmonic, America's most fractious ensemble...