Word: westly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...Berlin Wall memorial. Plans have been drawn up to add a secular shrine to the victims of the Wall with their portraits embedded in a "window of memory." The list of 136 victims includes eight G.D.R. border guards: two deserters shot by their comrades and six killed by West German police protecting escapees. To exclude them, says Klausmeier, would ignore the extent to which East Germans were coerced by the state. (See pictures of East Germany making light of its dark past...