East Berlin

Edwin Allan Lightner Jr., 82, a 40-year U.S. diplomat who saw the Berlin Wall erected and took part in a Cold War prisoner exchange with the Soviet Union, died Saturday at his home in Northport, Maine. The New York native joined the foreign service after graduating from Princeton University in 1930. He served in 18 countries before retiring in 1970. His last foreign post was ambassador to Libya from 1963 to 1965. He had been charge d'affaires of the U.S. Embassy in South Korea and was assistant chief of the U.S. Mission in Berlin when the wall was erected in 1961.

BERLIN -- The story goes that the Jewish community of Adass Jisroel died when its members fled or were murdered during the Holocaust.For years, people believed the story. East Berlin used some of Adass Jisroel's property as offices, West Berlin built apartments on other pieces of its land, and the official Jewish Community of Berlin gave its seal of approval to the actions.But Adass Jisroel never really died.Much to the surprise and embarrassment of the Jewish Community of Berlin and Berlin authorities, Adass Jisroel has re-emerged after 50 years as a small but vigorous Orthodox Jewish community.

I t's been nearly three years since the Wall came tumbling down. Still, it's the first thing most American tourists want to see as soon as they hit Berlin.All they're likely to find are bits and pieces. One small part of the infamous barricade remains standing at the Potsdamer Platz. It's mostly a tourist attraction at what was Checkpoint Charlie, the famed border crossing from West to East Berlin.Vividly painted on what was its west side, drab concrete on the other, the historic barrier is almost lost in the colorful souvenir stands offering everything from framed wall fragments to secondhand East German and Russian officer hats, passport stamps to German Democratic Republic license plate tags.

BERLIN -- Berliners yesterday put the brakes on right-wing parties that have been accelerating across Germany, but they left the major parties still stalled in their tracks and looking directionless.It was the first district elections in a united Berlin since 1946, but the vote had to compete with a warm, sun-drenched day. Politicians complained that more people went to the parks and beaches than to the voting booths. The vote was the lowest ever in Berlin, about 61 percent of the eligible voters.

New York. -- The last time I saw Berlin, less than a year ago, it was pleasantly boring. The wall and the tension were down, the feeling that perhaps tomorrow we die was gone, and the ''capital'' of a unified Germany was coming back down to earth after more than 40 years as a ''flashpoint'' or ''tinderbox,'' the place where World War III would begin.So President Clinton was in the wrong place at the wrong time last week to get what he wanted (and needs): a flashy rhetorical foreign-policy triumph that might have reminded Americans of the dangerous excitement when President Kennedy looked over the wall between West Berlin and East Berlin in 1963, or even the lesser moment in 1987 when President Reagan shouted that Soviet President Gorbachev should tear down the wall.

BERLIN -- A few weeks ago, Dr. Claudia Randeree was on th way to her neighborhood supermarket in East Berlin. Suddenly, a man walking near her opened his trench coat and flashed a pistol.Dr. Randeree, a gynecologist, just kept on walking. Behind her, the would-be mugger fired into the air. It was only after she was in the supermarket that it occurred to Dr. Randeree that the shots sounded real."It just seemed too unbelievable to me that someone would have a gun in East Berlin," she said after the incident.

BERLIN -- The day started wet and gray and threatened to get uglier as wary Berliners tried to get to work, to school, to doctors, or to beauty parlors with their public transit system shut down by the closest thing to a nationwide general strike since World War II."I always wanted to walk to work," groaned one secretary under an umbrella on West Berlin's main drag, the Kurfurstendamm. "Now I am, and it's raining." She'd gotten up before six to get to work at 9 at the telephone company. And she may be on strike herself before the end of the week.

BERLIN -- More than 16 years after the wall fell, West Berlin and East Berlin have melded together enough that a visitor wandering around the city often can't tell which was which. But at a dingy gray building surrounded by concrete walls topped with barbed wire, there is no escaping the creepy feel of communism. This was a prison run by the East German secret police, the Stasi, which has been preserved as a memorial to the crimes of the past. Our guide today is a paternal figure with the learned air of a retired college professor.

If Ulrike Shanks doesn't find a German flag to fly when German unity finally comes tonight, she'll piece together some black, red and yellow material and sew up her own.The 45-year split of East Germany from West, the capitalist West from the communist East, formally ends at midnight German time."

BERLIN -- After six months spent working with colleagues from the eastern part of the city, Klaus-Peter Tietz has come to a radical conclusion."They're not so bad workers after all. A lot of our prejudices about east Germans are simply wrong. We are the ones who have to rethink our assumptions," the 51-year-old municipal finance expert from former West Berlin said.For many former West Germans, Mr. Tietz's conclusion is unpleasant but true. A half-year after West and East Germany united, citizens of what was West Germany are learning that unification means they, too, have to change their behavior.