Poetry:

...In fact, however, the Iron AMERICA is a weekly journal of Curtain prevented millions of potential refugees from coming opinion published for the thoughtful West: the Communists were efficient border guards not only reader interested in the Catholic for themselves but for Western Europe...

...While by 1989 as anyone else...

...but opening up • Human Rights borders means exposing less-privileged citizens to low-wage • Religion, Education and competition from abroad...

...considered too old to train for new jobs and too young to be While this kind of help is no doubt genuinely necessary to cogiven early retirement and pensions...

...We'll then STAGE send you 22 weeks of our award-winning magazine for PICK A PAIR as much as 45% off the cover price...

...The 18: 24 September 1993 Commonweal hatred of foreigners in both West and East serves as a convenient cover for the deeper resentments between the two Germanies...

...For Canadian orders, add $7 to cover postage and GST...

...The real story in as the horizon, perfect Germany is German animosity toward one another...

...Summer House opened and closed El Bill Me...

...Forty years after that event, Lincoln Center has revived the play, under the Name direction of Joanne Akalaitis, perhaps because the producers sus- Address pect that there is more Bowles-style gooniness around in the 1990s than there was in the 1950s...

...If it is against freedom to travel, then its declara- special theme editions that provide an in-depth look at controversial tions during the cold war are exposed as mere rhetoric...

...The Offer valid for U.S...

...SUMMER HOUSE' & 'PERFECT GANESH' AMERICA The National Catholic Weekly here's no point in writing a play for Subscription Dept...

...Germans surprised and troubled me...

...What he was referring to was the fact that by the most severe postwar recession Germany has experienced, most of the key bureaucratic and governmental positions in with unemployment levels in East Germany significantly sur- East Germany are now occupied by Westerners who come to passing the levels of the Great Depression...

...Many East Germans feel that such scrutiny too often degenerates into exaggerated denunciations of all East Germans for the crime of being East German...

...The split and the but of airplane shadow far within Berlin's gay community seemed to reflect precisely the below fans and contracts split within the city itself: in the West, glitz and glitter...

...The real as the emptiness that secret behind German unification, I suspect, is that no one in carries us away...

...add S7 to cover postage- All orders payable in U.S...

...finds In spite of the continuing high levels of violence against forwithout losing, all the way eigners in Germany, I could not get over the feeling that the very generalized concept "foreigners" was being used all over to the edge of the visible, the political spectrum as a way of distracting attention from yellow as the field, bright Germany's very serious problems with itself...

...and viewing everything negatively) have been in circulation for quite some time, but the reality behind them is disturbing...

...in the East, the more politicized, ininto another so it burns in sun...

...E To subscribe, simply fill out the coupon and return it to us along with your payment...

...Featured regularly are Now Western Europe is in the difficult position of having to incisive articles on contemporary put its money where its mouth is (or was...

...In tradition, invoke lively discourse the new Europe, much depends on the outcome of that remak- and serious thought...

...Derogatory words like Meanwhile, all East Germans in key positions, from proBesserwessis (a play on the words better and Wessi, implying fessors to sanitation engineers, have been subjected to rigorWesterners who think they know it all and are far superior to ous scrutiny to determine the extent of their collaboration with their Ossi cousins) and Jammerossis (a play on the words whine the Communist regime...

...A great many East Germans feel worse off as a result of German unification, and that East Germany that their country has been colonized and exploited by the West...

...We are the new niggers," suggested one actor during a conWhat happened instead was a short-lived boom in the West versation in an East Berlin theater, "and the West Germans are as a result of pent-up East German consumer demand, followed the colonial lords...

...particular wanted it...

...other way round-East Germans tend to perceive it as a kind The extent and ferocity of the hatred between East and West of colonialism...

...After forty years of separation, the Germans had grown completely estranged, and the process of unification has intensified rather than alleviated that estrangement...

...7 Payment Enclosed...

...way, the increasing openness, fluidity, and internationalization Join us as we explore such of the world's economy demand tough choices for Germany complicated issues as...

...Please send me 22 issues of AMERICA at the special 1954), shortly after her play In the introductory price of $14.95...

...In a world without borders, the third world can come to • Religion and the the first world, while the social contract within the first world Transformation of Politics crumbles...

...This, too, is part of the "new world the First Amendment order" that is emerging in the wake of the collapse of commu- • The Health Care Crisis nism...

...Particularly hard- "hardship posts" in the East for a year or two to help realign hit have been women and people in their late forties and fifties, the East German bureaucracy according to Western standards...

...The troubled, violent youth in West and East Receive 22 issues Of Germany are using foreigners as scapegoats for their own problems in coming to terms with life in the more difficult circumstances of the unified Germany...

...tent of the problems associated with German reunification...

...Western governments used to issue solemn statements condemning the Edited by the Jesuits since 1909, lack of freedom to travel in the East...

...In Just as in the times of communism, it is hard to engage in 1990 Chancellor Kohl had foolishly declared that a new German any kind of conversation in East Germany without quickly comeconomic miracle was around the corner, that no one would be ing to the political situation...

...in the along a river that searches East, grit and bitterness...

...funds play both baffled and delighted me when I first saw it...

...Box 48468 • Atlanta, CA 30362-1468 i Jane Bowles said in Vogue (May 1, 0 YES...

...pened to Rohwedder might well-and indeed should-happen and Ossi, implying Easterners who are constantly complaining to other West German officials...

...but a country with rigid border controls risks isolat- • Population, the Church ing itself from economic development...

...It had Commonweal 24 September 1993: 19...

...without moving...

...In the West, the more nonpolitical, consumer-oriented gays marched down Not sea, not earth, its steel Kurfurstendamm, West Berlin's equivalent of Fifth Avenue, slices one field and spills celebrating gay lifestyles...

...Without ever knowing the City State Zip S' 4305 woman, I was one of her goony friends from the beginning...

...Either issues and prominent personalities...

...had been a schism in Berlin's gay community...

...They knew very little about most East Germans had by now had personal contact with West the country to their east and failed to recognize the ex- Germans, a great many viewed those contacts negatively...

...and the Pope As I left Berlin this time, I was acutely aware that here was Issues which, in the best of Jesuit a city and a country in the process of remaking themselves...

...and other European countries: closing down borders means cutting off potential access to the world economy...

...Earth is sectioned, "Europride," as the organizers called it-and so gays and lesparceled except where the trees shag the loops bians streamed in from London and Paris, only to find that there and runs of the water...

...One particularly poignant example of the divisions between Michael Cadnum East and West came at the end of June, when gays and lesbians Flying over a River in Berlin celebrated Stonewall Day, the traditional Gay Pride Day in the United States and Europe...

...AMERICA What is rarely mentioned in the discussion about foreigners The National Catholic Weekly and refugees in Germany and Europe is that the situation is a direct result of the collapse of the cold-war system and the rigid For As Little As $14.95 border controls which once existed in Eastern Europe...

...would soon become a blossoming landscape...

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...t is now quite clear that in spite of their professed con- A poll published while I was in Germany showed that, even cern for East Germany and desire for German reunifi- three years after unification, most young West Germans still cation, West German authorities were as caught off guard have not had any personal contact with East Germans...

...One woman in my street ordinate the infrastructure in both parts of Germany-after all, declared that for her, life was over: "Not a single good thing it was East Germany that joined West Germany, and not the has come to me as a result of German unification," she said...

...If it is truly for free- theology and current events, lively dom to travel, then it can hardly build walls and iron curtains film and book reviews as well as of its own...

...your-face gays marched through the former Jewish ghetto and Cars glint along a levee, campaigned against xenophobia and anti-Semitism...

...perspective...

...Berlin had been chosen Sky as the collecting point for Europe's gays this year-the city of covers everything...

...You have to reach more people...

...on Broadway...

...your five hundred goony friends," P.O...

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