Posted on 10/25/2009 7:50:58 AM PDT by luckybogey
History comes back to haunt us. Just over 20 years ago, the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: “Britain and western Europe are not interested in the unification of Germany. The words written in the NATO communique may sound different, but disregard them. We do not want the unification of Germany.” She went on to say...
About one year after the construction of the wall, Peter Fechter attempted to flee from the GDR together with his friend Helmut Kulbeik. The plan was to hide in a carpenter’s workshop near the wall in Zimmerstrasse and, after observing the border guards from there, to jump out of a window into the so-called death-strip, run across it, and climb over wall topped with barbed wire into the Kreuzberg district of West Berlin near Checkpoint Charlie.
When both reached the wall, guards fired at them. Although Kulbeik succeeded in crossing the wall, Fechter, still on the wall, was shot in the pelvis in plain view of hundreds of witnesses. He fell back into the death-strip on the Eastern side, where he remained in view of Western onlookers, including journalists. Despite his screams, he received no medical assistance either from the East or the West side. He bled to death after about an hour...
Grosz: lost splendors
Grosz is an icon of the Weimar Republic and the ambiance of those interwar years—apocalyptic, grotesque, foreboding. He was an incarnation of his age, like Kurt Weill in music and Bertold Brecht in poetry. So modern was he that he changed his name from Georg to George in homage to America, the land of skyscrapers, automobiles, Jack London and Fenimore Cooper...
(Excerpt) Read more at luckybogey.wordpress.com ...
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