Word: one
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...eleven days after a state visit by Mikhail Gorbachev. Ever since, Krenz has had to scramble to find concessions that might quiet public turmoil and enable him to hang on to at least a remnant of power. He has been spurred by a series of mass protests -- one demonstration in Leipzig drew some 500,000 East Germans -- demanding democracy and freedoms small and large, and by a fresh wave of flight to the West by many of East Germany's most productive citizens. So far this year, some 225,000 East Germans out of a population of 16 million have...
...deutsche mark notes to finance a celebration (the East German mark, a nonconvertible currency, is almost worthless outside the country). "I just can't believe it!" exclaimed Angelika Wache, 34, the first visitor to cross at Checkpoint Charlie. "I don't feel like I'm in prison anymore!" shouted one young man. Torsten Ryl, 24, was one of many who came over just to see what the West was like. "Finally, we can really visit other states instead of just seeing them on television or hearing about them," he said. "I don't intend to stay, but we must have...
...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...
...around 10% of the population, might flee to the West if the borders were opened -- as they were last week all along East Germany's periphery. (Within 48 hours of the opening of the Wall, nearly 2 million East Germans had crossed over to visit the West; at one frontier post, a 30-mile- long line of cars was backed up.) West Germans fear they simply could not handle so enormous a population shift...
...Wall still locking people in, such talk might have been hard to believe. Today, with the barrier chipped, battered and permeable, it is a good deal easier to accept. In the end it does not matter whether Eastern Europe's Communists are reforming out of conviction or if, as one East German protest banner put it, THE PEOPLE LEAD -- THE PARTY LIMPS BEHIND. What does matter is that the grim, fearsome Wall, for almost three decades a marker for relentless oppression, has overnight become something far different, a symbol of the failure of regimentation to suppress the human yearning...