Word: westly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...shrunk dramatically, falling by more than one-quarter to 230,000 since 1990 as young people have left to find jobs elsewhere. Despite the exodus, and a birthrate that has dwindled to almost nothing, the town still has an unemployment rate of about 14%, double that in the old West Germany. And as a new economic crisis strikes - this time a global one - Halle isn't immune. Its economy has crashed in the past six months. Across the region - but especially in places like the town of Eisenach, where a new auto industry has been built up over the past...
Germany has learned a second lesson; big spending packages don't work if the economic policies underlying them are miscued. In hindsight, eastern Germany's economic wellbeing was sabotaged at the very beginning of the reunification process by the political decision to exchange its currency for West German marks at the rate of one-to-one. Haimann, of the Halle Chamber of Commerce, thinks that was a crucial error. The true value of the old East German mark was just one-fourth or one-fifth of the West German currency, so when it was swapped in 1990 at parity...
...showered as if from a watering can across the economic landscape. But the fact remains that when the communist state collapsed, the urgent issue at hand was how to integrate 17 million East Germans into a suddenly reunified country, and quickly. Despite some lingering resentment in both east and west, that work is done. In a line policymakers today might take to heart, Zimmerman of the DIW says that the infusion of cash to the east "wasn't a failure. The problem is that the expectations were too high...
That assessment may sound admirably prudent. But Germany is in bad shape. In Halle, they're feeling the pinch, again - even if the situation is (remarkably) not quite as bad as it is in west German regions such as the environs of Stuttgart, where almost half a million people have been put on short-term work since last October as auto and machinery factories have slowed production. The east has been somewhat protected because its firms don't export as much as their west German opposite numbers. An unmistakable streak of eastern stoicism helps, too. "I notice that when...
...young Sondheims?" There won't be any. Not because high-brow musical theater is dead, but because the old Sondheim keeps on being new. Composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, 79, continues to dominate the genre he has constantly reinvented, first with Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins on West Side Story in 1957, Company (1970), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979) and Sunday in the Park with George...