Word: niebank
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Dates: during 2009-2009
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...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...
...That simple sentiment - revulsion about the Wall and all it represented - proved powerful enough to reunify Niebank's fractured nation. After Nov. 9, 1989, when the G.D.R. abandoned border controls, the drive for unity provided an overarching purpose that for many years shaped national politics. Reunification was Germany's greatest achievement of the last century - greater, even, than its postwar reinvention as an economic powerhouse. But as Germany prepares for an election just a few weeks before the 20th anniversary of that magical night in 1989, the fall of the Wall has become not just a metaphor for what Europe...
...What Was Rich Is Now Poor After the G.D.R. closed its frontiers in 1952 to stanch the flow to the West, Berlin's internal borders remained porous. Niebank met her husband at dance classes. She could have slipped west to join him but she decided to apply for permission to leave the G.D.R. The wedding took place on Aug. 5, 1961; her exit permit was to be granted 10 days later. But during the early hours of Aug. 13, the East German army ringed West Berlin with barbed wire and armed guards. The Wall had been built...
...South of the cemetery from which Niebank escaped, the Berlin Wall trail follows a green scar of borderland between Wedding and Prenzlauer Berg, districts linked in Cold War days only by a crossing at Bornholmerstrasse. This was the first of seven inner-city checkpoints to abandon controls in 1989 after an apparatchik named Günter Schabowski announced the lifting of travel restrictions on G.D.R. citizens. At first officers tried to turn away the many thousands who congregated, pedestrians just wanting a look at the other side, and lines of olive green and turquoise blue Trabant cars. Finally the numbers...
...Such laments are common among older Ossis. They get short shrift from Niebank. Life after she settled in West Berlin didn't prove easy - she divorced in 1970. She has worked hard and dutifully shelled out her "solidarity taxes" to lift the eastern German economy. "We had to pay for the East," she says, "but they're full of envy." Young Germans, she says, have moved on. "My sons have absolutely no interest in history. They've never asked me about how I survived the war and they're not interested in the Wall," says Niebank. "Young people think...