Word: stasis
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...police, the government and the conservative establishment. The poignant image of a woman cradling Ohnesorg's head as he lay dying on the ground became etched in Germans' minds. But now it has emerged that the police officer who pulled the trigger was actually a spy working for the Stasi, East Germany's dreaded secret police. The revelation has stunned Germans and thrown a whole new light on Germany's past. (See pictures of East Germany making light of its dark past...
...researcher working for a government agency that manages the old communist regime's secret police records stumbled across the new information as she was carrying out research on another project. The former West Berlin cop, Karl-Heinz Kurras, has a bulging Stasi file of some 7,000 pages. Kurras, it turns out, was a member of the East German SED Communist Party as well as an active Stasi agent. He joined the West Berlin police at the age of 22 in 1950, but five years later he switched sides and went to the authorities in East Berlin. Kurras wanted...
...students aged between 15 and 17, and found that many, especially those actually living in areas that formed part of East Germany, have an extremely distorted view of the GDR. More than half of the respondents, for example, believe that the GDR was "not a dictatorship," and that the Stasi was an intelligence service like any other, deployed mostly against people of other countries rather than against its own citizens. The figures are slightly lower among respondents in western Germany. The study also found that students tend to remember the social policies of the GDR in a very positive light...
...Ostalgia" industry leaves people like Klaus Schroeder speechless. "People really seem to think the GDR was a big joke, which results in such crudities as a Stasi pub," says the professor of political science at Berlin's Free University. "What's gonna be next, a Gestapo Inn? It's absurd...
...Victims' organizations don't see the joke: They reacted furiously when the pub, situated only yards away from the large gray building complex that used to house the Stasi, opened last month. The Union of Organizations for the Victims of Communist Oppression called for a boycott of the bar, warning that it would "negate the suffering of thousands of former political prisoners or victims of persecution" by turning it into a "fun factor" in order to make profit. Owner Wolfgang Schmelz, not unhappy with the publicity generated by the controversy, dismisses the accusations. "Nothing is being trivialized here, no victims...