Word: leipzig
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...Gorbachev revolution came home last week. Many of the words and images were familiar from last year's upheavals in Eastern Europe, but the setting was new: at the geographical and political center of the Communist world. This time it was not in Prague, Budapest or Leipzig but in Moscow that citizens thronged the streets with banners that could be loosely translated THROW THE BUMS OUT! This time it was in the Kremlin that the bums themselves seemed to take heed and the custodians of absolute power began the process of giving it up. And this time Mikhail Sergeyevich...
Rather, let's give credit where credit is due: to the people of Eastern Europe, the marchers in Prague's Wenceslas Square, the courageous protesters in Leipzig, the thousands slaughtered in Bucharest. They, along with their martyred kindred in Beijing, are the People of the Decade...
...suspicious of what I have been reading and seeing on television, suspicious because I see very few stories -- actually only a few quotes and sound bites and pictures of the same demonstrators in Leipzig shouting their unification slogans -- as evidence that the country's citizens are marching headlong toward one Germany. In East Berlin, where I rode the trains back and forth to the West from the Friedrichstrasse Station, where I walked into cafes and discos and shops and asked people their feelings, I could hardly find any citizens who said they wanted a reunified, single Germany. Perhaps...
Then in October the revolution came home to East Germany. It started with freedom marches in Leipzig. For a long moment, it looked as though there might be another Tiananmen after all. On Oct. 9 the 77-year-old party boss Erich Honecker ordered the police to use "all available force" to clear the streets, but Egon Krenz, then in charge of security, persuaded him to rescind the order. Each week the Monday demonstrations grew, to 200,000 on Oct. 23, to 480,000 on Nov. 6. The marches, always peaceful and sober, increasingly impressive, spread throughout East Germany...
...succeeded Erich Honecker reveals to TIME that he told officials to disobey any order to shoot demonstrators in Leipzig. He invites "all political forces" to shape a consensus that will serve his country's majority. But he insists that present borders must be respected and takes a dim view of German reunification...