East Germany

After four decades of denying a dark past, East Germany today apologized to Israel and all Jews for the Nazi Holocaust and accepted joint responsibility for the slaughter of 6 million Jews during World War II. "East Germany's first freely elected Parliament admits joint responsibility on behalf of the people for the humiliation, expulsion and murder of Jewish women, men and children," said a statement read by Speaker Sabine Bergmann Pohl to a televised session of Parliament.

Christa Wolf, one of Germany's most celebrated writers for her depictions of life in the former communist East, but who was later damaged by revelations she collaborated with its secret police, has died. She was 82. Wolf died Thursday in Berlin, according to an announcement from her publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag, which gave no cause of death or further information. A committed Marxist in her early years, Wolf focused on life in the socialist state, exploring its ideals and the role of the individual in her novels such as "Divided Heaven" (1963)

A 21-year-old bricklayer and a 17-year-old student from East Germany fled over the fortified border to West Germany early Tuesday, police said. The two climbed over frontier fences and reached West German territory near this northeastern town without drawing the attention of East German border troops, a police spokesman said.

Manfred Gerlach Last East German head of state Manfred Gerlach, 83, who was the last head of state of East Germany, died Monday in a Berlin hospital after a long illness, his family and friends told the German media. When the once-monolithic East German power structure began crumbling before the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989, Gerlach won the support of ordinary East Germans for speaking out against the ruling party and the oppression of anti-communist activists.

The U.S. ambassador to West Germany today criticized East Germany for requiring diplomats traveling between East and West Berlin to present passports, but stopped short of delivering a formal protest to the Soviet Union, diplomatic sources said. U.S. Ambassador Richard Burt met at his West Berlin residence with the Soviet ambassador to East Germany, Vyacheslav I. Kochemasav, to discuss the policy.

Communism is East Germany's reason for being. Take away its Marxist economic base, replace its single-party regime with a free political system, and East Germany's claim to be something separate and distinct from West Germany would evaporate. Hungary will be Hungary, in language, culture, historical memory and all the other things that make for nationhood, after its Communist rulers have been swept from power.

Since last spring hundreds of East Germans have fled to the West by first traveling East, going to Hungary on vacation and then sneaking across the border into Austria. At the same time, though, many other would-be refugees have been caught by Hungarian border patrols and returned to East Germany, where they face years in prison for "fleeing the republic."

Question: I want to trace my father's family, but they came from a village that is now East Germany. Is it possible to get records from there? Answer: For a long time East Germany was uncooperative with genealogical researchers. However, now its government has decided that genealogy is a scientific study that can help "develop a humanistic concern in a well-developed Socialist society." In 1967 the Zentralstelle fur Genealogie was established and is part of the National Archive Administration.

West Germany's Steffi Graf says the political upheaval in East Germany has raised her hopes she will one day be able to play there. "I get one-third to half (of my fan mail) from East Germany," Graf said Monday. "I get so many letters from there. I think the people who write just want to be able to see me play." Among the most memorable letters Graf said she has received came from a 6-year-old East German girl. "She wanted to know if I could come and help her with her tennis," Graf said.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said Wednesday that East German Communist Party leader Erich Honecker has pledged 30,000 tons of grain to help overcome food shortages. Ortega, who was granted $20 million in aid earlier this week during a visit to Peking, told a news conference after talks with Honecker that Nicaragua and East Germany have also reached an economic cooperation agreement for 1987.

Hans Joachim Tiedge West German spy defected to East Germany Hans Joachim Tiedge, 73, a top West German counterintelligence officer who defected to East Germany in 1985, died April 6 at his home near Moscow, according to his German publisher. Tiedge, a Berlin native, led the hunt for East German spies for 19 years from a Cologne office and remained at his post even after his superiors became aware of his increasingly serious drinking problem and mounting debts. Heribert Hellenbroich, the head of West Germany's domestic intelligence agency, was fired shortly after the defection for keeping Tiedge on the job. Tiedge left East Germany for the Soviet Union in 1990, less than two months before German reunification.

Alight snow came down in Bucharest, covering the mounds next to freshly dug graves, open and gaping in long straight rows. "Here are the fallen," intoned a solemn priest as four men placed a wooden coffin before him on a wobbly trestle. Jacob Stetincu, shot by a sniper, lay wrapped in a thin cotton sheet, wearing a worn blue beret, snowflakes catching in his grayed mustache. After a hurried sacrament, the men nailed the lid shut, carried him to the nearest grave -- his widow struggling to keep up -- and shoveled in the heavy earth.

The global celebrations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall aren't entirely about commemorating the rebirth of freedom or reliving those thrilling moments when a perverse and repressive system collapsed. Listen closely to the exalted commentary recounting the events of those historic days and you're also likely to hear the subtle intonations of regret and nostalgia. I'm not speaking of ostalgie -- nostalgia for the Old East ( ost in German) -- that is still felt by a large number of residents of the former East Germany and other Eastern bloc nations.

Valentin Geissler has no memory of the wall. He was just 10 months old when it fell, and most of its traces have by now disappeared. But it still hovers over the city like a ghostly presence. "Sometimes I can see in the city where the wall was. . . . I don't remember specifically when I was told [about it]. I guess I kind of grew up with this knowledge." But the wall didn't play a big role in his childhood, not the way it had loomed over the lives of his parents. The restrictions, privations and other hardships of life in the former East Berlin are an alien concept.

One thing does lead to another. Last spring, I was obsessed with cleaning my garage; a week later, I had scheduled a trip to Berlin. As I admired my handiwork, I eyed an old cedar chest along one wall, and I realized I hadn't looked inside since 1988. I hadn't wanted to. After all, it was filled with mementos of my husband, Jerry, who died in 1987 when he was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. But now I was curious; I couldn't remember what was in it. Surely, it was long enough to brave the memories.

Martina Metzler peers at the piles of paper strips spread across four desks in her office. Seeing two jagged edges that match, her eyes light up and she tapes them together. "Another join, another small success," she says with a wry smile -- even though at least two-thirds of the sheet is still missing. Metzler, 45, is a "puzzler," one of a team of eight government workers that has attempted for the last 14 years to manually restore documents hurriedly shredded by East Germany's secret police, or Stasi, in the dying days of one of the Soviet bloc's most repressive regimes.

Wolfgang Schmidt, a former world record-holder in the discus throw who spent more than a year in an East German prison, has been allowed to leave his communist homeland, a West German newspaper reported Tuesday. The Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper said Schmidt arrived in West Germany on Monday after receiving permission from East German authorities to emigrate. Schmidt, 33, was the captain of the East German track and field team until August 1982.

Amid the seemingly universal euphoria over the changes in East Germany, am I the only person alive who remembers the 1930s and '40s? Were all of our journalists, diplomats, military experts and academic authorities born yesterday? Your Op-Ed article touting the "logic" of German reunification really raised my hackles (Nov. 13). So, it is logical that all the German-speaking people who share a history and culture should want to be one nation? How long before it is logical to declare an anschluss with Austria?

Bernhard Schlink is best known to American readers as the author of "The Reader," the Oprah-anointed, bestselling novel whose film adaptation provided the role that won Kate Winslett an Oscar. In Europe, the German author is equally known for a gritty series of literary detective novels featuring an aging and irascible public prosecutor-turned-detective, Gerhard Self. "Self's Murder" is the fourth and, according to the author, the last in the series, though Schlink's characteristically ambiguous ending leaves the door at least slightly open to the possibility of further adventures.

Armin Mueller-Stahl didn't have to do a lot of research to play a former East German Stasi officer in the thriller "The International," which opens in theaters today. The 78-year-old actor, who possesses vibrant Paul Newman-esque blue eyes, was well acquainted with the secret police of the former socialist state. He lived under their repressive rule until 1980, when he emigrated to West Germany.