Word: past
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...victims includes eight G.D.R. border guards: two deserters shot by their comrades and six killed by West German police protecting escapees. To exclude them, says Klausmeier, would ignore the extent to which East Germans were coerced by the state. (See pictures of East Germany making light of its dark past...
...memorial - argues that the success of Die Linke in the eastern states reveals a dangerous form of amnesia. His book Honeckers Erben (Honecker's Heirs) depicts Die Linke as direct descendants of G.D.R. leader Erich Honecker's repressive communist regime. "It's a very human quality to whitewash the past," he says. But he adds the warning: "It means one can't learn from history...
...antidote to ostalgie. But the bulk of Berlin's tourist industry colludes in revisionism, selling Berlin's history to visitors in meaningless lumps, like the wall peckers hawking pieces of the Wall. Yet just as you despair that Germany will ever escape its conflicted sense of the past, the Wall trail crosses the River Spree, and symbols of the nation's astounding resilience come into view. The Reichstag, opened in 1894 when Germany was a young nation-state, and later burned as the Nazis took power, is now the home to a thriving democracy. The Chancellery is currently occupied...
...stability, democracy, prosperity - paradoxically highlights its failings, the sections of society that have been excluded from the success story. Berlin has memorials everywhere, the earnest expression of modern Germany's desire to acknowledge its difficult history. Yet for every memorial, there's also a theme-park rendition of the past. At Potsdamer Platz you can have your picture taken with smiling "border guards" next to remounted Wall panels, decorated with faux graffiti on their eastern faces. "It's disgusting," says Knabe. "And it makes harmless something far from harmless." (Read: "The Battle For Berlin...
...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 of the future not the past." (See pictures...