In 1971, a limited telephone service was re-established between East and West Berlin for the first time in 19 years.
Formanek had been in Berlin off and on about a month, going back and forth between East and West, sneaking past grim-faced border guards, covering demonstrations in East Berlin and then going back to the West to send the television stories.
From 1961 to 1989 it was the best-known border crossing between East and West Berlin.
In the mid-1990s, an early Ostalgie-retailer, mondosarts.com, fought plans to reshape him to comply with European Union standards, winning him a reprieve in east Berlin and the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt.
So, to satisfy them, the city has devised a new east-west border--a red stripe painted through Berlin's heart along the route of the demolished wall.
Now, by becoming part of the city-state government in Berlin, which straddles east and west, the party is hoping to win acceptance at last as a normal part of Germany's body politic, rather than be dismissed as a regional oddity, doomed to fade away as east and west grow closer together.
Questions like those are at the heart of a new book by Timothy Garton Ash, a British historian of Eastern Europe, describing a nine-month stay during 1980 in what was then East Berlin.
For a taste of life in the former East Berlin marvel at the imposing buildings that line Karl-Marx-Allee or visit the DDR Museum (Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse 1) for a hands-on experience of the minutiae of daily life in the GDR.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in Berlin today for a meeting of would-be Middle East peacemakers to discuss how to deal with Palestinian's new unity government.
It would be a shame to leave Berlin without investigating the phenomenon of Ostalgie -- nostalgia for life in the old East Germany.
Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena.
"I wish to emphasize that, as a Berlin-based company, we are just as interested in the preservation of the East Side Gallery as a historical monument as are Berliners and people in the entire world, " he said.
When painting the start of the stripe at Checkpoint Charlie, a former east- west border-crossing where new building has almost entirely blotted out the past, Eberhard Diepgen, Berlin's mayor, felt obliged to calm unease by declaring that there was no intention to split the city again.
In 1962, East German border guards shot and mortally wounded 18-year-old Peter Fechter, who had attempted to cross the Berlin Wall into the western sector.
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