Word: walls
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...been divided by a cinder-block barrier, part of a fortification some 100 miles (160 km) in length which would eventually consist of a row of reinforced-concrete panels, a second fence and a "death strip" patrolled by snipers. Its architects called the structure an "antifascist protection wall" but Berliners knew it simply as die Mauer - the Wall. It was engineered not to protect, but to imprison...
...then scrabbled through the passage toward the husband who waited for her in the West. She still chokes with fear and anger at the memory of what she endured to leave the German Democratic Republic (G.D.R.). "It was so painful," she says. "I never wanted to look at the Wall again." (See pictures of the Berlin Wall...
...That simple sentiment - revulsion about the Wall and all it represented - proved powerful enough to reunify Niebank's fractured nation. After Nov. 9, 1989, when the G.D.R. abandoned border controls, the drive for unity provided an overarching purpose that for many years shaped national politics. Reunification was Germany's greatest achievement of the last century - greater, even, than its postwar reinvention as an economic powerhouse. But as Germany prepares for an election just a few weeks before the 20th anniversary of that magical night in 1989, the fall of the Wall has become not just a metaphor for what Europe...
...Nowhere is Germany's obstinate gulf - a division that Germans call "a wall in the head" - more evident than in Berlin. The physical Wall has been all but expunged. In 1989, Mauerspechte - wall peckers - chipped out and sold pieces of the concrete from the Wall's graffiti-strewn western face; later, municipalities sent diggers to do the job more thoroughly. Like a clumsily retouched image, the Wall was airbrushed out of the picture. But its shadow remains, and with it other fractures in German society: generational fissures, cracks between communities that benefited from the fall of the Wall and those...
...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...