Posted Nov 10, 2014, 12:05 PM
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Join Date: Oct 2008
Location: Europa
Posts: 917
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Somber, hopeful ceremonies mark 25 years since the Berlin Wall fell
CNN
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Berlin now shines as a crown jewel of central Europe. It's a far cry from the city and the country that were bombed to ruins during World War II. And Germany is now the world's fourth largest economy and the driving market in the European Union.
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Vibrant, Timid Berlin
New York Times
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A QUARTER-CENTURY ago today, the Berlin Wall fell, and since then this city has been on a roll. It’s one of the party capitals of the world and an affordable center for young artists and musicians, with enough layers of history to inspire a novelist for a few lifetimes. And its economy has benefited greatly from a growing start-up scene. In a country dominated by pleasant but boring cities, Berlin is Germany’s one truly cosmopolitan metropolis.
Many of these accomplishments are laid out in “Berlin Now: The City After the Wall,” a recent book by the German author Peter Schneider. He is right in saying that in recent decades no other city “has changed as much — and for the better — as Berlin,” lauding the sense of openness that has drawn immigrants, revived the shattered Jewish population and made the city a magnet for a creative class that is also luring cutting-edge businesses.
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Berlin: a tale of two cities
Financial Times
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Everyone talks about the global artists, clubbers and wannabes colonising the world’s cheapest cosmopolitan city, but tech yuppies and the government caravan are fast pricing out the artists. Current Berlin chatter about house prices recalls Ireland circa 2003. Moreover, tourist hordes have replaced the old occupying armies. The greatest miracle wrought by capitalism and depoliticisation: Berlin now has polite shop assistants and taxi drivers.
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Berlin’s Fractious Unity
NYT
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In short, Berlin is finding new ways to celebrate, to feel good about ourselves as Berliners, as Germans, no “east” or “west” or “foreigners” allowed. The fact that more and more people feel at home in Berlin today is more or less unwittingly supported by the diversity of our government, which was unthinkable in the years of the Cold War. For the past nine years, a woman from the former East Germany has been running the country from right here in Berlin; the federal president, also from the East, lives out of wedlock with his partner; the Ministry of Finance is overseen by a vigorous and highly respected man who happens to use a wheelchair; the Ministry of Defense by a woman with seven children; the longtime mayor of Berlin — now stepping down — is openly gay.
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25 Years After the Wall Cracked Open, a New Berlin Is Emerging
National Geographic
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Awash in reminders of Germany's tragic past, the city is reinventing itself with a "good karma" vibe.
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But for all its grievous history, Berlin might actually be a model, in embryo, of how to get the modern world right. It's the most unlikely of outcomes. Berlin—the city of trauma, of savagery and sorrow, an island for 40 years, no more connected to the rest of the continent than a space station—now, potentially, leading Europe into a civilized, open, generous future.
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Hipster King Klaus Wowereit Rebuilt Berlin on Champagne and Anarchy
Business Insider
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Yet it serves as the perfect epigraph for modern Berlin, a city which has cast off the cloak of Cold War suspicion and reinvented itself as Europe's capital of cool.
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In Berlin, life is a cabaret — again
Washington Post
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Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall — an anniversary marked Sunday — this brooding metropolis has gone from being a Cold War capital to a magnet for untamed youth. Relatively cheap rents and a fiercely bohemian sensibility have transformed Berlin into what Prague was in the 1990s and Buenos Aires was in the 2000s — a beacon for penniless hipsters, international artists and merrymakers of every stripe.
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And, surveys show, many are coming at least partly to party — or, better said, to partake in a spurt of decadence not seen since the cabaret days of the 1930s. The cathedral of cool is Berghain, a seething world of drugs and sex that boasts hours-long lines and a random door policy that strikes fear into the hearts of all who try to enter. But the city is overflowing with ever more new temples to youthful exuberance, liberation and counterculture.
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But in recent years, Berlin has seen an explosion in so-called creative industries — ranging from art spaces to tech start-ups to advertising firms — that have capitalized on its status as a beacon for youth.
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‘No one in Berlin at that time will ever forget those days’
Gulfnews
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The city of Berlin has a combative spirit. A never-say-die attitude, coupled with the will to prevail against the sternest of odds. These characteristics have been represented through various moments in European and world history, ancient and contemporary.
Berlin showcases the essence of the German spirit — ambition, progress, discovery and an ability to constantly rise above the limits set by others and by itself.
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