East Germany

NIEDERSCHMIEDEBERG, Germany -- The world's first ecologically correct, ozone-safe refrigerators are coming off the assembly line at a drab East German plant in Lower Saxony.Developed with the aid of the environmental organization Greenpeace, the new refrigerator cools without ozone-eating chlorofluorocarbons, uses 10 percent less energy than comparable models -- and saved the manufacturer from extinction.Called Clean Cooler, the "Greenfreeze" refrigerator uses the naturally occurring gases propane and butane as coolant.

RIBNITZ-DAMGARTEN, Germany -- Eberhard Tiede is a talented free-market entrepreneur, but he had to live 40 years under communism before he found that out.Now, 2 1/2 years after he launched his business in the poorest part of what was then East Germany, he looks like a million dollars and in fact may be worth its equivalent in German marks. Sometimes he says he is, sometimes he says he's not quite.His company, Firmengruppe Eberhard Tiede, is housed in a brand-new building in a small business park just outside this Baltic coast town.

BERLIN -- At the big electronics plant in east Berlin, Bernhard Doering now takes ginseng tea in the morning with his new Korean colleague, Woongil Kim."It's one of our new tastes," Mr. Doering says.East Berlin's electronics workers have been acquiring these new tastes since Korea's global Samsung conglomerate took control of the plant at the first of the year.Hard work may be one of the new Samsung flavors."If you drink ginseng tea, you can do more work," says Mr. Kim. "Ten hours a day or more."

BERLIN -- The trial of former East German Communist leader Erich Honecker ended last night with neither a bang nor a whimper but only a sad, grave sigh of mercy for the dying former dictator.Mr. Honecker was accused in the deaths of 13 people killed at the Berlin Wall as they tried to escape his regime.The Berlin Supreme Court declared yesterday that the trial of Mr. Honecker, who is 80 years old and ailing, violated constitutional protections of his "human dignity." They then told the criminal court to reconsider its imprisonment order.

Several years ago, "Europe '92" was the hottest topic of economic futurists. What would happen when 12 markets became one, when an engineering design specification good in one country needed no change for the other 11, when a sausage meeting health standards in one met them in all, when people traveled from one to another without bothering to show papers?Would U.S. business be ready for the challenge and the opportunity? The phrase Europe '92, the year in which all the bureaucratic changes would be accomplished, really meant '93, the first day of which all changes would be in effect.

KLEINMACHNOW, Germany -- People of the little suburba town of Kleinmachnow have taken to the streets in their fight to stay in the Hansel and Gretel houses where they live.They come out on Saturday mornings to stand in polite groups of 200 to 500 at the roads into their town. There they turn aside traffic from Berlin and let people know of their complaint -- one more legacy of the Berlin Wall, whose bare-dirt scar is still visible here.They protest government property policies that have allowed former owners in western Germany to make claims on 2,300 of 3,200 homes in Kleinmachnow in the three years since the reunification.

BERLIN -- Poet-playwright Bertolt Brecht never had any modest doubts about the value of his work, but even he might have been surprised at the $7 million or so being paid for his literary archives.The city of Berlin has agreed to pay Brecht's heirs a reported 11 million marks, about $7 million at today's rates, for the collection of manuscripts, correspondence, notebooks and diaries.Like Baltimore's H. L. Mencken, Brecht, the author of the modern stage classics "The Threepenny Opera," "Mother Courage" and "Galileo," seemed to save every scrap of paper he ever wrote a word on.And he wrote a lot of words -- at least 40 stage plays or adaptations, several movies, hundreds of poems and one novel, not to mention journals, letters, political essays, criticism and a virtual encyclopedia of the theory and practice of theater.

Two glimpses of Willy Brandt, former mayor of West Berlin and former chancellor of Germany:March 19, 1970 -- It is high noon in Erfurt, an East German industrial city near the defining line in the Cold War struggle. As the nation holds its breath, Chancellor Brandt sets foot on the soil of Communist East Germany -- the first West German of his rank ever to do so. His walk from the train station to the Erfurter Hof across the plaza, watched by cheering East Germans pressed against police lines, seems as eerie and unreal as the moment six months earlier when man had first walked on the moon.

Q. How can you get Blue Cross of Maryland to process a claim fast? A. Make it for executive entertainment expenses.United Germany is making it a crime to have spied for East Germany against West Germany but not the other way round.You may soon earmark 10 percent of your tax payment for deficit reduction. The other 90 percent is for debt service.

BERLIN -- The gray-haired men and women gather once agai at the memorial in the East Berlin People's Park to remember a war lost nearly 60 years ago.They come bearing red roses and nostalgia, and the conviction they fought the good fight.They are the few surviving German veterans of the Spanish Civil War, the great anti-fascist cause of the 1930s, a war that began with great idealism and ended in deep cynicism.They have survived wars and concentration camps. They've seen their dream of a socialist utopia in the former East Germany corrupted and finally dissolved.