Word: wall
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...Symbol of Resilience These days juritza makes a living as a tour guide and one-man 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...
...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...
...economy. "We had to pay for the East," she says, "but 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...
...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...
...G.D.R. Turkish guest workers from West Berlin found that a handful of hard cash ensured they were treated like kings by the Ossis. These days Turan counsels the long-term unemployed. Among the 200,000 Berliners of Turkish origin - many live in districts along the old course of the Wall - joblessness, which averages 14% across the city, hovers around 50%. There's yet another irony there. "Turks came here to work," says Turan. "We were Gastarbeiter - guest workers. And there was work. But it changed very quickly after the Wall came down." As Ossis moved west in search of jobs...