Word: west
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...ordinary mayor has-protocol responsibilities as the head of a quasi-autonomous state, and the responsibility for liaison with Allied commanders in the city. He also has a unique set of problems. According to East German officials, some 48 Western "terror," espionage and propaganda organizations operate out of West Berlin. Inevitably, their endless, shadowy war with the 60,000 Communist agents operating out of East Germany creates clamorous incidents in West Berlin, exposes the city to endless complaints from Moscow. Willy, like most Berliners, has come to regard some of the underground groups as "grownups playing cowboys and Indians," would...
...Western powers confront the interior of the Communist world with a visible example of freedom in action. From Berlin, Western powers draw back their most accurate intelligence of what is going on in Eastern Europe. More important, Berlin constitutes the Soviet empire's greatest escape hatch. Through West Berlin every day there still pass some 250 East Germans-not just the aged and infirm, but the ablest and most vigorous citizens of an East German satellite crucial to Moscow's economic and political plans...
...Berliners' own name for themselves is "die Insulaner"-the islanders. Implicit in the phrase is an awareness of living in a world that for all practical purposes has an area of only 186 square miles. (The unpredictability of the East German police, which discourages most West Berliners from venturing into "the Zone," bears particularly hard on warm summer weekends when the road to the city's one big public resort, the suburban lake of Wannsee, is jammed with virtually every car in Berlin...
What worries Willy even more is the flood of refugees who pour daily into West Berlin, most of them ultimately to be flown out to the "mainland" of West Germany. Since the majority of the refugees are young, their flight is turning East Germany into a nation of oldsters; it is also creating a labor shortage in East Germany. Since 1949 more than 2,000,000 people have fled East Germany-more than three times the natural population increase. Says Willy Brandt: "When East Germans ask me what to do ... I tell them to stay as long as they...
...vaunted economic gains are all show: the bulk of the new housing in East Berlin is on the spectacular but dead Stalinallee. And with a total automobile production last year of 36,000, East Germany still has a long way to go to catch up economically with West Germany, which produced more than 1,000,000. But it has been a year since East Germans needed ration cards to buy food...