Word: war
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...Whether or not to include the G.D.R. guards is just one more example of the difficulty that Germans still have with their history. For much of the period after World War II, both the G.D.R. and West Germany resisted serious examination of their collective culpability for Nazism. In the West, that denial poisoned relations between the generations, infusing Germany's student and counterculture movements with an anger not matched in other countries. A similar failure to confront the truth about the G.D.R. - its violent repression and the extent to which East Germans accepted and sometimes aided the regime - expresses itself...
...Nowhere has history been more thoroughly defanged than at Checkpoint Charlie, the famous crossing at Friedrichstrasse that has mutated into a kind of G.D.R. funfair. Tourists jostle for ice cream at the Kalter Krieg (Cold War) parlor, buy Russian hats and I ♥ BERLIN T shirts, and pose at a reconstruction of the American military post. "Cool," says a teenage visitor to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, inspecting a VW Beetle with a secret compartment for smuggling human cargo. "Reunification was really great," says Alexandra, a 15-year-old from southwestern Germany, as she browses in the museum's gift shop...
...solidarity taxes" to lift the eastern German 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...
...criticism at home and abroad after a bombing in northern Afghanistan ordered by German troops killed dozens of people, including civilians. In an address to parliament, Merkel expressed regret but insisted she would not "accept premature judgments" about the incident, the deadliest involving the nation's military since World War II. The Sept. 4 strike on two fuel trucks hijacked by the Taliban, which was carried out by U.S. fighter jets, has heightened the Afghan war's unpopularity in Germany and erodes confidence in Merkel's coalition government ahead of parliamentary elections Sept...
...were fighting a war in Iraq, and still are; health care needed reforming, and still does. But before despairing that some things never change, consider how much has. In 1991 the world watched a black motorist named Rodney King be beaten by L.A. cops, all of whom were acquitted; a majority of whites still disapproved of interracial marriage. Ask yourself, Would the people we were then have voted for a mixed-race President and a black First Lady...