East Berlin

A MEMORABLE EXPERIENCEBerlin 1989, on the brinkLeaving West Germany on our way to Berlin, we felt as if we had driven from a color movie into a black-and-white silent film. It was September 1989, and the Berlin Wall and communism still stood.As we drove through an opening in a dense border of barbed wire at Bay-reuth, armed guards stopped our car. They scrutinized our passports and instructed us to go directly to Berlin without leaving the highway at any time.Remembering the colorful and lively towns in West Germany, we were disheartened by the bleakness we encountered.

BERLIN -- Mrs. Mustafa Akyol, a stout Turkish matron from the Black Sea town of Trabzon, waters her flourishing garden on a traffic island that once belonged to Communist East Germany.A jolly woman in a beaded Muslim head cover and a shapeless dress that reaches to her toes, Mrs. Akyol grins happily as she talks about her crops through impromptu interpreters.She grows corn, beans, onions, sweet potatoes, sunflowers, tomatoes and herbs on this tiny plot.Mrs. Akyol's garden is one of the more prosaic enterprises that have sprung up along the strip where the Berlin Wall used to be. Here in Kreuzberg, Berlin's equivalent of New York's lower East Side, some anarchist enclaves have been settled in for years, tucked into oddball patches of East Berlin once left outside the wall.

BERLIN -- Aso Mohammad's plans to visit a friend recently in the eastern part of this city ended quickly when he got on the subway.He had no sooner sat down than three German teen-agers with crew cuts and olive-green bomber jackets came up to him, demanded that he leave the train and, when he refused, dragged him off at the next station, where they beat him up.After spending the night in the hospital for stitches and a mild concussion, Mr. Mohammad is...

Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Karen Kimmel, a student at Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, wandered the streets of East Berlin. She wanted to find out what the young East German artists who hadn't been producing official art had been doing, cut off as they were from the mainstream of Western art. What she found, after considerable searching, was exciting enough to make her call back to Boston and Lelia Amalfitano, director of exhibitions at the museum school.

BERLIN -- In the dear dead days of the East German Republic, the more ironic socialist burghers called the Palast der Republik "Palazzo Prozzo," an Italian pun that meant Pretentious Palace, or Palace of Pretentions.The Volkskammer, the rubber-stamp Parliament, met in the Palace of the Republic, and its members pretended they were really representatives of the people.Nobody paid much attention to them because everybody knew they were powerless and irrelevant. The leaders of the Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (DDR)

Heiner Mueller, 66, the enfant terrible of the stage under communism in East Germany and one of Europe's best-known playwrights, died Saturday of cancer in Berlin. His death was announced by the Berliner Ensemble, a theater founded by Bertolt Brecht in East Berlin after World War II that Mr. Mueller took over as artistic director in 1992. His early plays celebrated East German socialism, but he was banned after later works blamed communism for oppression, violence and anguish. Among his most popular plays was "Germania Death in Berlin," which dealt with the building of the Berlin Wall and a failed 1953 workers' uprising in East Germany.

BERLIN -- The KGB, the once dreaded Soviet secret police and espionage agency, may be disintegrating in Moscow, but it is still very much alive in Germany.That is illustrated by a recent incident, German counterespionage sources say.Shortly after the Soviet consul general in Hamburg failed to persuade a Soviet soldier to give up his application for political asylum in Germany and return home, they say, the KGB stepped in.While the man was window shopping in Heide, in northern Germany, a rental car drove up, and two men stepped out and shoved the protesting man into the back seat.

BERLIN -- Sgt. Jerry Brooks can't help grinning when he thinks of the irony. His unit's tanks -- the symbol of Western resolve to hold this city during the hottest days of the Cold War -- will not be allowed back into the United States until every bit of German soil is washed off."Department of Agriculture regulations against pests. It makes sense but is kind of funny. None of the soil we defended is allowed back," said the 27-year-old tank commander, who was born in Baltimore and grew up in Lynchburg, Va.Sergeant Brooks and his three-man crew have spent the last two weeks taking their M-1A1 tanks apart, meticulously cleaning them, then putting them back together.

BERLIN -- With the recession easing, employment increasing and inflation at bay, the economic wounds of German reunification are healing smoothly. Yet, five years after the Berlin Wall came down, east and west Germans seem as divided as ever, sneering at each other across a psychological gulf that isn't likely to narrow soon.Today is the anniversary of the moment the wall was opened to hordes of East Germans, a moment that symbolized the collapse of the Communist regime and reunification of East and West Germany.

DESPITE THE RECENT reunification of Germany, a revolution of taste marches on.Dinner tables in what used to be East Germany are slowly becoming laden with the rich foods West Germans enjoyed for years. Due to government regulations, East Germans went without luxury foods since World War II. Items such as butter, cream, beef, chocolate and coffee were always scarce. The small amount of dairy products and livestock East German farmers produced were mostly exported to other Iron Curtain countries.