Word: pankow
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...accomplished without ceremony because the two governments refused to meet each other to open it. Bridge or no bridge, the truth is that the two Germanys seem to be drawing farther apart. For the first time since 1962, the Berlin Wall remained closed for Christmas this year: Bonn and Pankow could not agree on terms to renew their informal "humanitarian" pact to allow West Berliners to visit relatives living in the Communist sector of the city...
...with Bonn. Whereas he was willing to negotiate before on an informal basis, Ulbricht now refuses to talk unless the West Germans decide to give official recognition to his regime-and, in the process, accept the principle that Germany must remain divided. There is another reason for the freeze: Pankow wants absolutely nothing to do with Herbert Wehner, Bonn's new Minister of All-German Affairs...
...Peer. Wehner holds a special terror for the Pankow regime: before the war, he was in the top echelon of the German Communist Party. He was Ulbricht's pal and peer, gave orders to many of the men who now make up East Germany's coterie of bosses. Arrested in Sweden in 1941, he renounced Communism from his jail cell and was expelled from the party. Ever since, his former comrades have regarded him as a traitor and a menace. Twice their gunmen have tried to kill him, and his appointment as All-German Affairs Minister brought bitter...
Wehner has also scrapped one of the primary articles of faith of all previous Bonn governments: that West Germany will never, under any circumstances, recognize the Pankow Communists. He would be happy to establish relations with East Germany, Wehner allowed last week, under one condition: that "the present regime" hold "free and secret elections" to prove that it represents the 17 million people it rules. Communist states being what they are, that day is anything but imminent...
Even Communists were not sacrosanct. A pair of East German army officers were dragged from their cars and knocked about like so many imperialists. The offense was severe enough to draw a stiff protest from Pankow-one of many objections from Communist countries to China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Even Cuba's Fidel Castro, no believer in gentle Communism, denounced the Peking paranoids. "It is a sad circumstance," lamented a Havana editorial, "that the People's Republic of China has given the enemies of socialism cause for laughing and taunting." Russia weighed in with...