ABSTRACT
Look closer, however, at two older ladies chatting amicably on the park bench. Despite sharing a common language, they grew up in two different countries (West and East Germany) with diametrically opposed political systems. The aged pensioner walking with a cane is a veteran of Hitler’s army, although, becoming a citizen of West Berlin after the war, he says he completely embraces democratic values and his wartime allegiance to the Third Reich is no longer relevant.1 The businessman rushing to a meeting-could he have been, as hundreds of thousands of East Germans were, employed by the Stasi, the communist secret police? Further along you see a group of dark-haired young men speaking a language that is clearly not German. Perhaps they are refugees from Bosnia, where they witnessed unspeakable horrors, or, more likely, they are of Turkish descent. Like many Turks in Germany today, they may have been born in Germany and can speak fluent German, but they, like their ancestral homeland, have difficulty gaining acceptance as full-fledged Europeans.
