East Berlin

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.

BERLIN -- Denied a job and threatened by anti-Semitism, Alia Lapitzky decided that the Soviet Union's new freedoms held nothing for her. She arranged a visa through acquaintances in Germany and left Kiev three months ago."There was a pogrom atmosphere, and we couldn't lead a normal life. For us, Germany's [Nazi] past wasn't as bad as the Soviet Union's present," said the 26-year-old doctor.Nearly 3,000 other Soviet Jews have made similar decisions and arrived in what was then East Germany over the summer and early fall.

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 -- 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.

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.