Word: republik
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Answer: Angehoriger des Zolls der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik -a member of the customs office of the German Democratic Republic. Until a few years ago, such an official would have been called simply ein Beamter (an official), and he is still called just that in West Germany. But in an effort to show that their half of the country has nothing in common with the other half, East Germany's Communist bosses are inventing and adapting a whole new lexicon of words and phrases. Explains Die Freiheit, a Communist Party news paper in the East German city of Halle...
Ulbricht tries to make that slogan work, sometimes acting as if he had even stricken the word Germany from his vocabulary. A party-lining East German no longer speaks of himself as a German at all but as a citizen of the D.D.R.-the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. East Germany's culture minister used the recent 300th anniversary of the Dresden State Theater to proclaim that there is no common German culture, and a Foreign Ministry officer recently declared: "The word Germany now is only a geographical concept." Ulbricht even changed the name of East Germany's Secretariat...