Memória Virtual |
- Queda do Muro de Berlim – 20 anos (VI)
- Queda do Muro de Berlim – 20 anos (V)
- Queda do Muro de Berlim – 20 anos (IV)
- Queda do Muro de Berlim – 20 anos (III)
- Queda do Muro de Berlim – 20 anos (II)
- Queda do Muro de Berlim – 20 anos (I)
Posted: 09 Nov 2009 05:05 AM PST     . 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. |
Posted: 09 Nov 2009 03:50 AM PST      . 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. |
Posted: 09 Nov 2009 02:35 AM PST . 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.” |
Posted: 09 Nov 2009 01:20 AM PST . 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. [...] |
Posted: 09 Nov 2009 12:05 AM PST . 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. |
Posted: 08 Nov 2009 04:05 PM PST . 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) . . |
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário