Berlin Wall

BERLIN - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged Europeans and Americans yesterday to see the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall as a call to action against new global threats. On the eve of celebrations marking 20 years since the collapse of the wall that divided East and West Berlin, Clinton said the hard work that went into ending the Cold War must be channeled to meet new challenges, including the fights against extremism and climate change. As the Obama administration looks to often reluctant European allies to bolster their NATO forces in Afghanistan, Clinton...

It is the backdrop of Boston baseball, ever green, ever looming, a certain sign that the game you are watching is being played at Fenway Park. It is our Leaning Tower of Pisa, our Big Ben, our Eiffel Tower. It is manmade and magnificent, even with its dents and flaws. And it has come to be synonymous with our town as much as the Golden Dome atop the State House, the Bunker Hill Monument, and the Paul Revere House in the North End. It is the left-field wall at Fenway Park, perhaps the most famous facade in North America.

BERLIN -- Rainer Hildebrandt, who founded a Berlin Wall museum at the Checkpoint Charlie crossing that attracts thousands of tourists each year, died Jan. 9 at his home after a long illness. He was 89. Born in Stuttgart, Mr. Hildebrandt moved to Berlin in the early 1940s to study psychology. He befriended and was profoundly influenced by one of his professors, Albrecht Haushofer, an anti-Nazi activist who was shot by Adolf Hitler's SS near the end of World War II. Following the war, during which Mr. Hildebrandt was imprisoned for political reasons, he founded in West Germany the...

BERLIN - Otto von Habsburg saw the crumbling of the empire his family had ruled for centuries and emerged from its ashes as a champion of a united and democratic Europe. The oldest son of Austria-Hungary’s last emperor fought Nazism and Soviet communism during long decades of exile from his homeland, and was lionized by leaders across the continent as “a great European.’’ Mr. Habsburg died yesterday at age 98 in his villa in Poecking in southern Germany, where he had lived since the 1950s, his spokeswoman, Eva Demmerle, said.

BERLIN -- Germans marked a subdued 15th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on yesterday, with high unemployment in the formerly communist east and a sense in people's hearts that the nation has not yet fully reunited. No big celebrations, parades or fireworks recalled Nov. 9, 1989, the day East Germany's communist regime opened the wall almost by accident and set off national euphoria that peaked with German reunification 11 months later. At a preserved section of the wall in central Berlin, Mayor Klaus Wowereit laid a wreath commemorating the more than 200 East Germans...

BERLIN - The Berlin Wall’s longest remaining stretch has been restored to its state of nearly two decades ago after artists repainted the colorful murals they created in the aftermath of the notorious barrier’s opening. Berlin yesterday inaugurated the restored section of the concrete wall, which is known as the East Side Gallery and snakes along the bank of the Spree river for three quarters of a mile. A popular tourist attraction, it boasts famous images such as a boxy East German Trabant car that appears to burst through the...

It is the backdrop of Boston baseball, ever green, ever looming, a certain sign that the game you are watching is being played at Fenway Park. It is our Leaning Tower of Pisa, our Big Ben, our Eiffel Tower. It is manmade and magnificent, even with its dents and flaws. And it has come to be synonymous with our town as much as the Golden Dome atop the State House, the Bunker Hill Monument, and the Paul Revere House in the North End. It is the left-field wall at Fenway Park, perhaps the most famous facade in North America.

BERLIN -- The Gesundbrunnen subway station in north Berlin leads out to a shopping mall and a park, connects to a street car and a few buses, and has probably tens of thousands of people walking up and down its stairwells every day. Few of them probably ever see the pale green door that blends so seamlessly into the swimming-pool-tile facade the station's designers selected in a moment of poor taste. Then Thomas Breuer arrives with a gaggle of people following him, unlocks the door, and steps inside.

By now, an entire generation has grown up thinking of the Berlin Wall — if they think of it at all — as the place where Ronald Reagan issued a ringing, six-word challenge to his Soviet counterpart in 1987: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’’ To an earlier generation, it was the place where John F. Kennedy proclaimed “Ich bin ein Berliner’’ in the summer of 1963. But in “The Wall: A World Divided,’’ which airs tonight at 10 on Channel 2, narrator Joe Morton offers a useful perspective on the events that finally...

BERLIN -- Associated Press photographer Jockel Finck, whose assignments included the fall of the Berlin Wall and the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia, has died. He was 43. Mr. Finck was vacationing with his family in Traunstein in southern Germany when he had a heart attack and died Jan. 28, his family said. Born in Einbeck in Lower Saxony, Mr. Finck began his photojournalism career as a freelancer in Hannover, and joined the Associated Press in Hamburg in 1986. He moved to the news agency's Berlin bureau in 1989 just as communism was crumbling in East Germany.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Edith R. Wyden, the mother of US Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, has died. She was 91. The senator said his mother, who fled Nazi Germany in 1936, died Sunday at a retirement community in Palo Alto, Calif. Edith Wyden was born in Koenigsberg, Germany, to George and Else Rosenow. The Jewish family first went to Iraq after leaving Nazi Germany, then immigrated to the United States in 1939. In 1947, she married Peter Wyden, whose family had also fled Nazi Germany.

By now, an entire generation has grown up thinking of the Berlin Wall — if they think of it at all — as the place where Ronald Reagan issued a ringing, six-word challenge to his Soviet counterpart in 1987: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’’ To an earlier generation, it was the place where John F. Kennedy proclaimed “Ich bin ein Berliner’’ in the summer of 1963. But in “The Wall: A World Divided,’’ which airs tonight at 10 on Channel 2, narrator Joe Morton offers a useful perspective on the events that finally...

Joshua Clover serves up a stiff intellectual drink in “1989,’’ his stimulating tour of the history of an idea; one might also view his brief, dense book as a tour through the idea of history. At the book’s core is analysis of four musical genres: hip-hop, acid house, grunge, and pop. He sets examples of each in context, and his commentary on each is illuminating. The premise of this prickly, demanding work is that the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989 signified, in some senses, the end of history.

When the Berlin Wall fell it was as if a John le Carré novel had suddenly been turned inside out and staged as a giant party. One could almost imagine Smiley actually smiling. Watched worldwide, the party took place at what had been the starkest flash point between East and West. An event that had previously seemed unimaginable now looks inevitable in retrospect. (Consistency is not a retrospective virtue.) There’s never been anything quite like Nov. 9, 1989. Too much of the experience of Central Europe in the 20th century has been of history with jackboots on. This was history wearing sandals...

BERLIN - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged Europeans and Americans yesterday to see the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall as a call to action against new global threats. On the eve of celebrations marking 20 years since the collapse of the wall that divided East and West Berlin, Clinton said the hard work that went into ending the Cold War must be channeled to meet new challenges, including the fights against extremism and climate change. As the Obama administration looks to often reluctant European allies to bolster their NATO forces in...

Saturday Night Live 11:30 p.m., Channel 7 Taylor Swift does double duty as host and musical guest. My money is on real-life Kanye to show up and redeem himself. (And maybe for Beyoncé to turn up, too.) Forbes Luxe 11 10 p.m., Travel More signs that the recession is waning: Poverty-chic makes way for celebrations of conspicuous consumption. In this new series, Forbes magazine partners with the Travel Channel to show us the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Edith R. Wyden, the mother of US Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, has died. She was 91. The senator said his mother, who fled Nazi Germany in 1936, died Sunday at a retirement community in Palo Alto, Calif. Edith Wyden was born in Koenigsberg, Germany, to George and Else Rosenow. The Jewish family first went to Iraq after leaving Nazi Germany, then immigrated to the United States in 1939. In 1947, she married Peter Wyden, whose family had also fled Nazi Germany.

BERLIN -- The hipsters, gazing from cafe tables through dark-tinted aviator glasses, sip lattes with indifferent ease. Next door, punks pound cans of beer outside a kiosk, their dogs padding restlessly up and down the sidewalk of Berlin's Kastanienallee. The street, just half a block from where the Berlin Wall once stood, is perhaps one of the last places in the capital where such a clash of styles is possible. The trendiness that pervades former East Berlin neighborhoods like Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, where Kastanienallee is located, has gentrified...

BERLIN - The Berlin Wall’s longest remaining stretch has been restored to its state of nearly two decades ago after artists repainted the colorful murals they created in the aftermath of the notorious barrier’s opening. Berlin yesterday inaugurated the restored section of the concrete wall, which is known as the East Side Gallery and snakes along the bank of the Spree river for three quarters of a mile. A popular tourist attraction, it boasts famous images such as a boxy East German Trabant car that appears to burst through the wall and a...

Sometimes being an art critic has an undeniably comic dimension. Take, for example, last week. Dutifully, but with high hopes, I spent three full days taking in the visual arts components of the 10th annual Boston Cyberarts Festival. I tried to approach this extravaganza, billed as "the first and largest collaboration of artists working in new technologies in all media in North America," as an ordinary member of the public. This meant spending a good hour each morning planning my route in the weirdly reassuring cyber-company of Google Maps, followed by six or seven hours of...