Word: trailing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Germany remains at the mercy of conflicting interpretations of history. In that context, one commemorative project is worth a closer look. The Berlin Wall trail, completed three years ago, cuts through the heart of Berlin like a pathologist's blade. It exposes Germany's underlying conditions, and reminds those who care to see of Germany's unfinished business...
...South of the cemetery from which Niebank escaped, the Berlin Wall trail follows a green scar of borderland between Wedding and Prenzlauer Berg, districts linked in Cold War days only by a crossing at Bornholmerstrasse. This was the first of seven inner-city checkpoints to abandon controls in 1989 after an apparatchik named Günter Schabowski announced the lifting of travel restrictions on G.D.R. citizens. At first officers tried to turn away the many thousands who congregated, pedestrians just wanting a look at the other side, and lines of olive green and turquoise blue Trabant cars. Finally the numbers...
...Wedding, past modern residential high-rises. "The West was flaunting what it could do, building these state-of-the-art apartments right next to the Wall," says Axel Klausmeier, an architectural historian who heads the foundation responsible for conserving and commemorating the Wall and its history. Today, as the trail wends through Berlin, you notice that people in low-status jobs - sweeping streets, cleaning toilets - are Easterners or immigrants. Yet there's also been a striking geographical reversal. The poorly paid and the unemployed were shunted into the high-rises of Wedding, in the west, as rich Berliners swooped...
...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 by Angela Merkel...
...East of Checkpoint Charlie, the Wall trail crosses Axel-Springer-Strasse to the north of its intersection with Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse. Springer, a West German press baron, owned newspapers that denounced the Federal Republic's nascent student-protest movement and Dutschke, its charismatic leader. When Dutschke was badly injured in an assassination attempt in 1968, the riots that followed exposed the rage young West Germans felt towards their elders. Two years later, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof founded the Red Army Faction, a left-wing terrorist group. In a 1971 survey, a quarter of West Germans under 30 professed...