Posts tagged ‘Berlim’
Queda do Muro de Berlim – 20 anos (X)
CLAMOR IN THE EAST; EAST GERMANY OPENS FRONTIER TO THE WEST FOR MIGRATION OR TRAVEL; THOUSANDS CROSS
East Germany on Thursday lifted restrictions on emigration or travel to the West, and within hours tens of thousands of East and West Berliners swarmed across the infamous Berlin Wall for a boisterous celebration.
Border guards at Bornholmer Strasse crossing, Checkpoint Charlie and several other crossings abandoned all efforts to check credentials, even though the new regulations said East Germans would still need passports and permission to get across. Some guards smiled and took snapshots, assuring passers-by that they were just recording a historic event.
Politburo Announcement
The mass crossing began about two hours after Gunter Schabowski, a member of the Politburo, had announced at a press conference that permission to travel or emigrate would be granted quickly and without preconditions, and that East Germans would be allowed to cross at any crossing into West Germany or West Berlin.
”We know this need of citizens to travel or leave the country,” Mr. Schabowski said. ”Today the decision was taken that makes it possible for all citizens to leave the country through East German crossing points.”
(The New York Times – edição de 10.11.1989)
A ler, também no New York Times:
-
A Division Through Time (infografia do “antes” e “depois” do Muro)
-
The View From the Wall (painel de fotos enviadas por leitores)
E, ainda, uma compilação de artigos publicados em diversos media a nível internacional (que fui agregando na minha conta no delicious).
De forma a facilitar a sua consulta, os 10 artigos hoje publicados no Memória Virtual, evocando esta data crucial da História, encontram-se reunidos aqui.
Queda do Muro de Berlim – 20 anos (IX)
Gorbachev: The Unlikely Patron of Change
The 1980s came to an end in what seemed like a magic act, performed on a world-historical stage. Trapdoors flew open, and whole regimes vanished. The shell of an old world cracked, its black iron fragments dropping away, and something new, alive, exploded into the air in a flurry of white wings.
Revolution took on a sort of electronic lightness of being. A crowd of half a million Czechoslovaks in Wenceslas Square would powder into electrons, stream into space at the speed of light, bounce off a satellite and shoot down to recombine in millions of television images around the planet.
The transformation had a giddy, hallucinatory quality, its surprises tumbling out night after night. The wall that divided Berlin and sealed an international order crumbled into souvenirs. The cold war, which seemed for so long part of the permanent order of things, was peacefully deconstructing before the world’s eyes. After years of numb changelessness, the communist world has come alive with an energy and turmoil that have taken on a bracing, potentially anarchic life of their own. Not even Stalinist Rumania was immune.
The magician who set loose these forces is a career party functionary, faithful communist, charismatic politician, international celebrity and impresario of calculated disorder named Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.
(Time – edição datada de 01.01.1990)
Queda do Muro de Berlim – 20 anos (VIII)
Life in The Golden Ghetto
As the East German regime collapses before its anti-Communist opponents, it is yielding up enough evidence of corruption to provide yet another cause of bitter popular resentment against the discredited hierarchy. The allegations of illegal nest feathering have shocked and outraged ordinary citizens, party members and nonmembers alike. Disgrace knows no limits for Erich Honecker, less than two months ago the most powerful man in East Germany: last week the former party chief and eight of his erstwhile top lieutenants were formally charged by the state prosecutor’s office with “enriching themselves through abuse of office.” Seven of the ex-Politburo members were packed off to jail pending trial. Illness spared the other two, including Honecker, from suffering the same fate — at least for the time being.
(Time – edição datada de 18.12.1989 – publicada a 12.12.1989)
Queda do Muro de Berlim – 20 anos (VII)
East-West: Turning Visions Into Reality
By the time George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in Malta, there was no longer any pretense that this was to be a meeting where they simply sat back and talked. How do you put your feet up when the deck beneath you is trembling and the winds are howling, in Marsaxlokk Bay and throughout the tattered Soviet empire? This first Bush-Gorbachev summit, which the American President initially proposed as a way to restart the becalmed U.S.-Soviet relationship, was now also the first to take place in the uncertain new world ushered in by the upheavals shaking Eastern Europe. And if this meeting was to be a step in shaping the future, there could be no more appropriate setting than at sea, even a sea as wild as the one last weekend around Malta. In a world that seemed to be dissolving, where better to meet than in a place with no boundary lines, no familiar landmarks — and no firm footing?
(Time – edição datada de 11.12.1989 – publicada a 05.12.1989)
Queda do Muro de Berlim – 20 anos (VI)
What happened in Berlin last week was a combination of the fall of the Bastille and a New Year’s Eve blowout, of revolution and celebration. At the stroke of midnight on Nov. 9, a date that not only Germans would remember, thousands who had gathered on both sides of the Wall let out a roar and started going through it, as well as up and over. West Berliners pulled East Berliners to the top of the barrier along which in years past many an East German had been shot while trying to escape; at times the Wall almost disappeared beneath waves of humanity. They tooted trumpets and danced on the top. They brought out hammers and chisels and whacked away at the hated symbol of imprisonment, knocking loose chunks of concrete and waving them triumphantly before television cameras. They spilled out into the streets of West Berlin for a champagne-spraying, horn-honking bash that continued well past dawn, into the following day and then another dawn. As the daily BZ would headline: BERLIN IS BERLIN AGAIN.
(Time – edição datada de 20.11.1989 – publicada a 14.11.1989)
Queda do Muro de Berlim – 20 anos (V)
Freedom!
For 28 years it had stood as the symbol of the division of Europe and the world, of Communist suppression, of the xenophobia of a regime that had to lock its people in lest they be tempted by another, freer life — the Berlin Wall, that hideous, 28-mile-long scar through the heart of a once proud European capital, not to mention the soul of a people. And then — poof! — it was gone. Not physically, at least yet, but gone as an effective barrier between East and West, opened in one unthinkable, stunning stroke to people it had kept apart for more than a generation. It was one of those rare times when the tectonic plates of history shift beneath men’s feet, and nothing after is quite the same.
(Time – edição datada de 20.11.1989 – publicada a 14.11.1989)
Queda do Muro de Berlim – 20 anos (IV)
When Gorbachev first spoke of “new thinking” in foreign policy, many in the West — especially in the U.S. — doubted his sincerity. The real test was whether Gorbachev would end the policy at the heart of the cold war: the subjugation of Eastern Europe. At the end of last year, in a speech at the United Nations, Gorbachev declared that he would. “Freedom of choice is a universal principle,” he said. Yet the doubts lingered. They always seemed to come down to the question: Is Gorbachev for real?
There can be only one answer now: yes, emphatically yes. Earlier this year, after Poland’s Communists lost the most open elections since World War II but tried nevertheless to thwart Solidarity’s effort to form a government, Gorbachev spoke by phone to the Communist Party leader, who subsequently backed down. Gorbachev has also provided public approval to the Hungarian reformers. In summing up a Warsaw Pact meeting in Bucharest last July, he pronounced: “Each people determines the future of its own country and chooses its own form of society. There must be no interference from outside, no matter what the pretext.”
(Time, edição datada de 06.11.1989 – publicada a 31.10.1989)
Queda do Muro de Berlim – 20 anos (III)
For the Russians, tempered by centuries of land invasions, national security has long been defined as the control of territory and the subjugation of neighbors. Moscow’s desire for a protective buffer, combined with a thousand- year legacy of expansionism and a 20th century overlay of missionary Marxism, was what prompted Stalin to leave his army in Eastern Europe after World War II and impose puppet regimes in the nations he had liberated. […]
“These changes we’re seeing in Eastern Europe are absolutely extraordinary,” George Bush told the New York Times last week. In fact, 1989 will be remembered not as the year that Eastern Europe changed but as the year that Eastern Europe as we have known it for four decades ended. The concept was always an artificial one: a handful of diverse nations suddenly iron- curtained off from their neighbors and force-fed an unwanted ideology. Soviet dominion over the region may someday be regarded as a parenthetical pause (1945-89) that left economic scars but had little permanent impact on the culture and history of Central Europe. […]
(Time, edição datada de 06.11.1989 – publicada a 31.10.1989)
Queda do Muro de Berlim – 20 anos (II)
The wall was illegal, immoral and strangely revealing—illegal because it violated the Communists’ solemn contracts to permit free movement throughout the city; immoral because it virtually jailed millions of innocent people; revealing because it advertised to all the world the failure of East Germany’s Communist system, and the abject misery of a people who could only be kept within its borders by bullets, bayonets and barricades.
(Time – edição datada de 25.08.1961)
Queda do Muro de Berlim – 20 anos (I)
The scream of sirens and the clank ot steel on cobblestones echoed down the mean, dark streets. Frightened East Berliners peeked from behind their curtains to see military convoys stretching for blocks. First came the motorcycle outriders, then jeeps, trucks and buses crammed with grim, steel-helmeted East German troops. Rattling in their wake were the tanks — squat Russian-built T-34s and T-54s. At each major intersection, a platoon peeled off and ground to a halt, guns at the ready. The rest headed on for the sector border, the 25-mile frontier that cuts through the heart of Berlin like a jagged piece of glass. As the troops arrived at scores of border points, cargo trucks were already unloading rolls of barbed wire, concrete posts, wooden horses, stone blocks, picks and shovels. When dawn came four hours later, a wall divided East Berlin from West for the first time in eight years.
(Time – edição datada de 25.08.1961)
Memória Virtual 