Posted on 05/09/2009 11:40:18 PM PDT by nickcarraway
German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged people Tuesday not to forget the brutality of Communist East Germany when she visited the former prison of the Stasi secret police in eastern Berlin.
In the year that Germany marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Merkel said it was crucial for young people to gain a sense of how human rights were violated in Stasi prisons.
"This memorial makes clear in an authentic setting in what brutal ways the dignity of human beings was damaged, and how lives were destroyed and torn apart for trivial reasons," Merkel said during a visit to the Hohenschoenhausen prison.
Merkel, a trained physicist who grew up in the German Democratic Republic or East Germany, became the first chancellor from the former GDR in 2005.
Visitors can still see the barbed wire, watchtowers, cramped cells and interrogation rooms in the prison at Hohenschoenhausen where political prisoners were detained. They were sometimes held for years without ever appearing before a court.
Since opening in 1994, the Hohenschoenhausen memorial has received rapidly growing numbers of annual visitors -- from 3,000 that year to nearly 250,000 in 2008.
The opening scene of the Oscar-winning 2006 film DasLeben derAnderen (The Lives of Others) was set in Hohenschoenhausen, although it was not filmed in the real prison.
Merkel's visit was to mark the 20th anniversary of the East German local elections of May7, 1989. Merkel said the civil rights activists who protested against those rigged elections ushered in the end of the dictatorship.
"May7 was the beginning of the end of the GDR," Merkel said earlier this week. "In this year of the peaceful revolution we should think of those who showed courage, by revealing the local elections to be a sham, or by escaping the GDR in protest."
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
does this mean she don´t liked the movie “Good bye Lenin”
;-)
She needs to come give that speech to our Congress since some obviously don’t see that we’re running in that same direction.
“for young people to gain a sense of how human rights were violated in Stasi prisons”
it might not matter. the left is actively generating a culture now where politics has been replaced by an arbitrary hate of your opponent. it’s just all about hating on the bush/cheney figure. and they can generate these figures from nowhere, even turning mccain into one.
ask 100 obama voters what they’d like to do to dick cheney, you’ll find 20-30 truly evil people.
He said GITMO would be Club Med by comparison.
And then you would have the democrats asking “how To’ questions.
Yes! Remember the atrocities of the Nazis (Germany), the Stasi (East Germany) the Ustashi (Croatia) the Japanese (WWII) and the Jihadis!
Waterboarding is a Sunday School Picnic game by comparison.
I was stationed in West Berlin from 84-88, I thought “Good Bye Lenin” was a great film.
i was only joking about merkel. personal i think “good bye Lenin” is a great film too.
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