President Horst Köhler awarded Germany’s highest honour, the Federal Cross of Merit, to 12 former East Germans on Monday for standing up to injustices committed by the communist regime.
The fall of the Berlin Wall sparked celebration, but also chaos in both halves of the city. <b>David Wroe</b> speaks with former West Berlin Mayor <b>Walter Momper</b> about how dicey November 9, 1989 really was.
Forget the magic of history and Helmut Kohl’s illusory “blossoming landscapes” – 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall eastern Germany has become a beautifully ordinary place, writes The Local’s Marc Young.
There’s no question East Germany persecuted its citizens, but have the communist regime’s henchmen been wronged since reunification? <b>David Wroe</b> investigates.
As thousands of East Germans surged past the Berlin Wall to taste freedom for the first time 20 years ago, Chancellor Angela Merkel visited the sauna and had a beer.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall rectified East Germany’s biggest crime. But as <b>David Wroe</b> reports, many of the communist regime’s victims are still seeking justice for other misdeeds two decades later.
Daily life in Germany’s formerly communist eastern half has changed dramatically in the 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. David Sharp turns back the clock in Eisenhüttenstadt.
As thousands of people celebrated the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, Victor Grossman feared he might be arrested. <b>Brett Neely</b> meets the American defector who fled to communist East Germany after deserting from the US Army.
Former Stasi prison inmate Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel has broken off a week-long live performance art re-enactment of his internment over the weekend due psychological distress, organisers have announced.
Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel, who famously lay prostrate across the border at Checkpoint Charlie in protest against the communist East German regime, returned Thursday to the notorious Hohenschönhausen Stasi prison for seven days to reenact his incarceration.
As the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches, workers at Berlin’s Bernauer Straße memorial are restoring a long-gone watchtower, daily <i>Der Tagesspiegel</i> reported on Tuesday.
Once a menacing death strip during the Cold War, Germany’s stretch of the Iron Curtain has been transformed into a leafy nature refuge, as <b>Hannah Cleaver</b> reports.
A former prisoner of East Germany's fearsome secret police will return to one of its jail cells in a reenactment of the communist regime's oppression 20 years after the Berlin Wall fell.
A new website launched on Wednesday offers users an interactive way to discover over 1,000 remaining bits of the Berlin Wall some 20 years after it fell.
The Left Party in the state of Brandenburg has cleared the way for a "red-red“ coalition with the Social Democrats after chairwoman Kerstin Kaiser ruled herself out of a ministry on Sunday amid concerns about her past links to the East German Stasi.
Twenty years ago this week, East Germany’s communist regime celebrated its 40th anniversary in power while the East German people took to the streets with their fists in the air. <a href="http://www.tagesspiegel.de" target="_blank">Der Tagesspiegel</a>’s Matthias Schlegel reports on the peaceful demonstrations that would help bring down the Berlin Wall.
Twenty years have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but victims of communist East Germany's despised Stasi secret police say fighting off history's ghosts is still a daily struggle.
Once a Stasi security training ground, the former East German city of Kallinchen is now dominated by thousands of tourists, including those drawn to a historic nudist camp and the re-purposed secret police facility.
Bodo Ramelow, the politician from Germany's socialist party The Left hoping to become the state premier of Thuringia, has reportedly been employing a former Stasi officer in his parliamentary office for years.
Berlin’s second-tier football club, 1.FC Union, has ditched its main sponsor following revelations the company's chairman had once been an officer with East Germany's dreaded secret police, the Stasi.
Nearly 20 years after the Berlin Wall fell, two men who tried to spirit their East German families to freedom in the West were honoured in a moving ceremony on Wednesday. AFP's Deborah Cole reports on a daring escape attempt and tragic love story.
Michael Jackson was in the files of the feared East German secret police, the Stasi, because of a concert he gave right next to the Berlin Wall in 1988, daily <i>Bild</i> reported on Thursday.
Berlin’s state interior minister Erhart Körting says he does not want to see background checks made to root out workers in public services with an East German secret police (Stasi) background.
Some 17,000 former East German secret police workers are likely working in local government authorities in eastern states despite background checks, daily <i>Financial Times Deutschland</i> reported on Thursday.
Two policemen assigned to guard Chancellor Angela Merkel’s weekend house in the Uckermark region of Brandenburg used to be in the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, it was revealed Friday.
