Word: berlin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...bought by the West German government. (The G.D.R. earned hard currency and rid itself of dissidents by literally selling thousands of political prisoners.) Yet some Ossis still think Juritza and his fellow prisoners deserved their punishment. He tells of falling into conversation with an old man on a Berlin street. When Juritza mentioned his stint in jail, the old man erupted in fury. "Someone forgot to kill you," he said...
...pictures of the Berlin Wall...
...Symbol of Resilience These days juritza makes a living as a tour guide and one-man antidote to ostalgie. But the bulk of Berlin's tourist industry colludes in revisionism, selling Berlin's history to visitors in meaningless lumps, like the wall peckers hawking pieces of the Wall. Yet just as you despair that Germany will ever escape its conflicted sense of the past, the Wall trail crosses the River Spree, and symbols of the nation's astounding resilience come into view. The Reichstag, opened in 1894 when Germany was a young nation-state, and later burned as the Nazis...
...That Germany has achieved so much in such a relatively short period after reunification - stability, democracy, prosperity - paradoxically highlights its failings, the sections of society that have been excluded from the success story. Berlin has memorials everywhere, the earnest expression of modern Germany's desire to acknowledge its difficult history. Yet for every memorial, there's also a theme-park rendition of the past. At Potsdamer Platz you can have your picture taken with smiling "border guards" next to remounted Wall panels, decorated with faux graffiti on their eastern faces. "It's disgusting," says Knabe. "And it makes harmless something...
...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...