East Berlin

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.

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 -- The then-East German Stasi secret police helped Libya organize the 1988 bombing of a jumbo jet over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, a well-placed Stasi officer says.But it is not believed that the nation's leaders knew anything of this activity.The officer and experts in the field also believe that the Stasi -- East Germany's secret police and intelligence service, which has since been disbanded -- made the attack and other acts of terrorism possible through years of organizational help, training and logistics for Libyan agents.

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. -- I was vehement when a Jewish newspaper publisher called to invite me to go to Berlin to participate in dedicating a conference center. No, I don't want to hear that language. No, I don't want to walk the bloodied streets. And no, I don't want to breathe the air that has been spiritually fouled by the lingering stench of decomposing flesh.But I did go to Berlin for a day of dedication, together with my wife, who had made a solemn vow not to step foot on German soil. What impelled me to go?

BERLIN -- Statues of Lenin lie toppled in some of the remotest outposts of the former communist empire in Europe, but the Soviet Union's founder still dominates a busy downtown intersection in Germany's capital -- protected by an unlikely coalition of artists and working-class locals.Never removed during the East German revolution, the 62-foot granite statue of Lenin originally became part of a quiet debate among historians about the future of 800 memorials to communist heroes in former East Germany.

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...

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.

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.

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.