Word: walls
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When the great breach finally came, it started undramatically. At a press conference last Thursday, Schabowski announced almost offhandedly that starting at midnight, East Germans would be free to leave at any point along the country's borders, including the crossing points through the Wall in Berlin, without special permission, for a few hours, a day or forever. Word spread rapidly through both parts of the divided city, to the 2 million people in the West and the 1.3 million in the East. At Checkpoint Charlie, in West Berlin's American sector, a crowd gathered well before midnight. Many...
...world has, or thought it had, become accustomed to change in Eastern Europe, where every week brings developments that would have seemed unbelievable a short while earlier. Nonetheless, the opening of the Wall caught it off guard. President George Bush, who summoned reporters into the Oval Office Thursday afternoon, declared himself "very pleased" but seemed oddly subdued. Aides attributed that partly to his natural caution, partly to uncertainty about what the news meant, largely to a desire to do or say nothing that might provoke a crackdown in East Germany. As the President put it, "We're handling...
...limited to the U.S.S.R. -- and preaching reform, Gorbachev has made it clear that Moscow will tolerate almost any political or economic system among its allies, so long as they remain in the Warsaw Pact and do nothing detrimental to Soviet security interests. The Kremlin greeted the opening of the Wall as "wise" and "positive," in the words of Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov, who said it should help dispel "stereotypes about the Iron Curtain." But he warned against interpreting the move as a step toward German reunification, which in Moscow's view could come about only after a dissolution...
...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, launched a Bonn Ostpolitik that focused on building contacts with the other Germany, proclaimed that "nothing will be the same again. The winds of change blowing through Europe have not avoided East Germany." Kohl, who drew some boos and whistles as well...
Running through the joy in West Germany, however, was a not-so-subtle undertone of anxiety. Suppose the crumbling of the Wall increases rather than reduces the flood of permanent refugees? West Germany's resources are being strained in absorbing, so far this year, the 225,000 immigrants from East Germany, as well as 300,000 other ethnic Germans who have flocked in from the Soviet Union and Poland. According to earlier estimates, up to 1.8 million East Germans, or around 10% of the population, might flee to the West if the borders were opened -- as they were last week...