Word: weste
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...wars, environmentalism and pacifism. They are now safely on the road to embourgeoisement, and no wonder: the bulk of their supporters - teachers, social workers, the "caring classes" - are employed by the state. Next to go was the hard left, Die Linke, an amalgam of former East German communists and West German leftists who could not stomach the reformism of Schröder when he led the SPD. In some regional elections in former East Germany, Die Linke has moved ahead of the Social Democrats. (Read: "Busting Out: German Pol Plays the Cleavage Card...
Graveyards are usually about endings. But in December 1961 Waltraud Niebank embarked on a new life in East Berlin's Pankow Cemetery. She might have been mistaken for a young widow as she scanned the headstones, although in truth, her husband was alive. He was living in West Berlin and Niebank had been separated from him for four months. Now she was looking for a concealed tunnel which would reunite them. Soon after their wedding, the cemetery had been divided by a cinder-block barrier, part of a fortification some 100 miles (160 km) in length which would eventually...
...Niebank hovered by an open grave, a voice from below said "Jump," so she did, 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...
...What Was Rich Is Now Poor After the G.D.R. closed its frontiers in 1952 to stanch the flow to the West, Berlin's internal borders remained porous. Niebank met her husband at dance classes. She could have slipped west to join him but she decided to apply for permission to leave the G.D.R. The wedding took place on Aug. 5, 1961; her exit permit was to be granted 10 days later. But during the early hours of Aug. 13, the East German army ringed West Berlin with barbed wire and armed guards. The Wall had been built...
...That night, jubilant Easterners surged into Wedding, past modern residential high-rises. "The West was flaunting what it could do, building these state-of-the-art apartments right next to the Wall," says Axel Klausmeier, an architectural historian who heads the foundation responsible for conserving and commemorating the Wall and its history. Today, as the trail wends through Berlin, you notice that people in low-status jobs - sweeping streets, cleaning toilets - are Easterners or immigrants. Yet there's also been a striking geographical reversal. The poorly paid and the unemployed were shunted into the high-rises of Wedding...