Word: visiting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...East Germany the situation came close to spinning out of control. Considered a hard-liner, Krenz succeeded the dour Erich Honecker as party chief only three weeks ago, and eleven days after a state visit by Mikhail Gorbachev. Ever since, Krenz has had to scramble to find concessions that might quiet public turmoil and enable him to hang on to at least a remnant of power. He has been spurred by a series of mass protests -- one demonstration in Leipzig drew some 500,000 East Germans -- demanding democracy and freedoms small and large, and by a fresh wave of flight...
...performed the task with brutal efficiency. Opening it up would have seemed the least likely way to stem the current outflow. But Krenz and his aides were apparently gambling that if East Germans lost the feeling of being walled in, and could get out once in a while to visit friends and relatives in the West or simply look around, they would feel less pressure to flee the first chance they got. Beyond that, opening the Wall provided the strongest possible indication that Krenz meant to introduce freedoms that would make East Germany worth staying in. In both Germanys...
...exclaimed Angelika Wache, 34, the first visitor to cross at Checkpoint Charlie. "I don't feel like I'm in prison anymore!" shouted one young man. Torsten Ryl, 24, was one of many who came over just to see what the West was like. "Finally, we can really visit other states instead of just seeing them on television or hearing about them," he said. "I don't intend to stay, but we must have the possibility to come over here and go back again." The crowd erupted in whistles and cheers as a West Berliner handed Ryl a 20-mark...
...Developments are now unforeseeable," said West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who interrupted a six-day official visit to Poland to fly to West Berlin for a celebration. "I have no doubt that unity will eventually be achieved. The wheel of history is turning faster now." At the square in front of the Schoneberg town hall, where John F. Kennedy had proclaimed in 1963 that "Ich bin ein Berliner," West Berlin Mayor Walter Momper declared, "The Germans are the happiest people in the world today." Willy Brandt, who had been mayor when the Wall went up and later, as federal Chancellor...
...million East Germans, or around 10% of the population, might flee to the West if the borders were opened -- as they were last week all along East Germany's periphery. (Within 48 hours of the opening of the Wall, nearly 2 million East Germans had crossed over to visit the West; at one frontier post, a 30-mile- long line of cars was backed up.) West Germans fear they simply could not handle so enormous a population shift...