Western Berlin Research Articles

Четырехсторонние переговоры по Западному Берлину. Документы Архива внешней политики Российской Федерации (ноябрь 1970 – март 1971 года). Предисловие и публикация Р. В. Долгилевича

Четырехсторонние переговоры по Западному Берлину. Документы Архива внешней политики Российской Федерации (ноябрь 1970 – март 1971 года). Предисловие и публикация Р. В. Долгилевича

Anthropogenic gadolinium as a microcontaminant in tap water used as drinking water in urban areas and megacities

► We provide data on rare earth element concentrations in tap water used as drinking water in Berlin, Germany, and London, UK. ► In contrast to the eastern part, tap water in western Berlin and in London shows high anthropogenic gadolinium (Gd) levels. ► Anthropogenic Gd is a micropollutant derived from contrast agents used in magnetic resonance imaging. ► 4-fold increase of anthropogenic Gd in Havel River from 1995–2010 suggests tap water Gd concentration will increase further. ► Anthropogenic Gd in river and tap water suggests high potential for presence of other waste water-derived xenobiotics. Gadolinium chelates have been used since 1988 as contrast agents in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and produce positive anthropogenic Gd anomalies in rare earth element (REE) patterns of river and lake waters. These Gd compounds are not removed in wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) due to their high stabilities, and are transferred to surface waters with the clearwater discharge from WWTP. Through natural and induced bank filtration, the anthropogenic Gd is also transported into groundwater. To date, there are no related acute health risks known, but the potential long-term effects of exposure to low doses have not been studied. Here REE data is presented for tap water from the City of Berlin, Germany, a metropolitan area that is known for its anthropogenic Gd-rich rivers and groundwater. Natural and induced bank filtration play important roles in Berlin’s freshwater resource management. Therefore, the extent to which municipal tap water that is used as drinking water is affected by anthropogenic Gd was investigated. Large positive Gd anomalies were found in tap water samples from the western districts of Berlin, indicating the presence of up to 18 ng/L of anthropogenic Gd on top of a geogenic background of 0.54 ng/L. In marked contrast, the amount of anthropogenic Gd in tap water from the eastern districts of Berlin is negligible to minor (maximum of 0.18 ng/L on top of a geogenic background of 0.26 ng/L). This strong regional difference likely results from the specific historical situation of Berlin, where before the re-unification of Germany in 1990, natural and induced bank filtration were necessities in isolated West Berlin, but unimportant in East Berlin, a situation that has seen little change during the past 20 years. Thus, drinking water resources in the western part of Berlin are more strongly affected by anthropogenic Gd than those in the eastern part. The high anthropogenic Gd concentrations found in some tap waters in Berlin clearly show that the Gd initially used as contrast agent is removed neither during natural nor artificial water treatment. This is further evidence for the high stability and long environmental half-lives of these compounds. Considering that the amount of anthropogenic Gd in the Havel River in Berlin has increased more than 4-fold over the past 15 years and that water migration from the Havel River to the groundwater wells take years to decades, the amounts of anthropogenic Gd in West Berlin tap water will increase further over the next few years. Due to its presence in tap water that is consumed as drinking water, millions of people are exposed to low doses of these anthropogenic Gd chelates. Additional data for the City of London, UK, for example, indicate that this is not a local phenomenon confined to the City of Berlin, but rather a common feature of tap water in metropolitan areas and megacities in countries with highly developed health care systems. Hence, the REE distribution in tap waters used for human consumption should be monitored, especially since the anthropogenic Gd chelates can also be used as tracers for emerging microcontaminants such as steroids, pharmaceuticals and personal care products.

A distribuição espacial dos termos do balanço de energia em superfície a partir de imagem orbital e observação de campo

Estimates of the balance energy in surface is performed over the Metropolitan Area of São Paulo (MASP). A modified method based on the procedure used by Lopes (2003), in the case of the Metropolitan Area of Lisboa (MAL) – Portugal, and a similar classification of land cover suggested by Sukopp et al. (1979), related to the Metropolitan Area of Western Berlin (MAWB) – Germany, are employed . Data sets obtained from sensors installed in orbital platforms and mobile platforms at the surface are combined and used in order to elaborate the analysis. The generated balance shows a pattern that is not analogous to the traditional one only generated from orbital data sets. Observations raised up into the urban canopy layer give us a new sense that comprises the meaning of the energy balance from a pedestrian perspective.

Of pigs and poison shelves

The following interview took place in the Kreuzberg section of western Berlin in August 2003. Bernd Lippmann is a secondary school teacher of physics and mathematics in western Berlin. Lippmann, 51, was arrested near the end of his GDR university studies in 1974 and sentenced to three years imprisonment. His crime? He had distributed “forbidden literature”—for example, Orwell’s Animal Farm, which was treated in the GDR as an incendiary work—and was caught by the vile “pigs” (the “Stasi” a.k.a GDR secret police). Herr Lippman’s tragic tale shows that, though it is hard for many Westerners today to think of laws that officially forbid works of fiction as a violation of human rights, banned novels have been more than just high school proscriptions in some nations. Indeed, Lippman’s story demonstrates that some citizens in dictatorships have paid for their passion to read with several years of their lives.

Party Discipline and Universalism: The Case of Budgeting in Berlin

Work on the US Congress has found that when partisan differences are strong, legislation tends to be passed by minimum winning coalitions. When partisanship is weak, Congress and its committees often rely on the norm of universalism or 'giving something to everyone' to pass legislation. Universalism in legislative voting is expected to lead to bloated or inefficient public spending. This article investigates whether these hypotheses about party discipline and universalism hold true outside the United States. A comparison of fiscal decision-making in local legislatures in eastern Berlin, where newly created political parties are weakly disciplined, and in western Berlin, where established party caucuses are highly disciplined, finds this is indeed the case. The article concludes by raising questions for future research on universalism and other post-communist legislatures.

Diagnostik und Therapie bei Gestationsdiabetes - Ergebnisse einer Umfrage bei niedergelassenen Frauenärzten/innen in Berlin

Der Gestationsdiabetes (GDM) gehört mit einer Häufigkeit von etwa 5 % zu den häufigsten Erkrankungen in der Schwangerschaft. Der klinische Alltag zeigt, dass in Deutschland kein einheitliches Vorgehen existiert.

Identical with What? Chartering the Unknown Waters of the Concept of Identity

Andreas Glaeser Divided in Unity—Identity, Germany, and the Berlin Police (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2000)Lutz Niethammer Kollektive Identität—Heimliche Quellen Einer Unheimlichen Kultur (Hamburg: Rowohlts Enzyklopädie, 2000)

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and diesel engine emission (elemental carbon) inside a car and a subway train

Significant concentrations of potentially harmful substances can be present in the interior of vehicles. The main sources of PAHs and elemental carbon (EC) inside a car are likely to be combustion emissions, especially from coal and traffic. The same sources can also be important for the interior of a subway train for which there are specific sources in the tunnel system, for example diesel engines. Twice, in summer 1995 and winter 1996 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) and diesel motor emission (estimated as elemental carbon) were determined in the interior of a car (a 2-year-old VW Golf with a three-way catalytic converter) and in the passenger compartment of a subway train (below ground). On each sampling day (in total 16 daily measurements in the car and 16 in the subway) the substances were determined in the breathing zone of the passengers from 07:00 h to 16:00 h under different meteorologic conditions (winter- and summertime). The car followed the route of the subway from the western Berlin borough of Spandau to the south-eastern borough of Neukölln, and back. The sampling represented a realistic exposure model for driving in a high traffic and polluted urban area. The electric subway train (also 2 years in use) connected the same parts of Berlin (31 km underground). The mean values obtained during the two measurement periods (summer/winter) inside the car were 1.0 and 3.2 ng/m 3 for benzo[ a]pyrene, 10.2 and 28.7 ng/m 3 for total-measured-PAHs, 14.1 and 8.2 μg/m 3 for EC and in the subway 0.7 and 4.0 ng/m 3 for benzo[ a]pyrene, 30.2 and 67.5 ng/m 3 for total PAHs, 10.9 and 6.9 μg/m 3 for EC. A comparison between subway and car exposures shows significantly higher concentrations of PAHs in the subway train, which can be explained by relatively high concentrations of fluoranthene and pyrene in the subway. So far a satisfactory explanation has not been found, but one source might be the wooden railway ties which were formerly preserved with tar based products. In wintertime in both transportation systems the concentrations of benzo[ a]pyrene are three to four times higher than in summer corresponding to the changing of the ambient air concentrations.

Pluralism, Conflict, and Legislative Elites in United Germany

For a social scientist interested in the evolution of individuals' ideological values, Germany's division in 1949 and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 raise intriguing questions. To what extent have the socialist and parliamentary systems inculcated different ideological values in eastern and western Germans? Because of the centrality of political elites in maintaining political systems, especially in espousing system-conforming values, we examine eastern and western Berlin MPs' views toward one democratic core value, pluralist competition. Pluralist conflicts of interests represent a cornerstone of liberal democracies.' Any society that places a premium on individual liberties and democratic rights must permit its citizens and groups to compete peacefully for their share of influence in the policymaking process. However, some analysts attribute the failure of the Weimar democracy to the reluctance of German society to accept pluralist competition.2 While this assessment applies primarily to prewar Germany, the division and unification of Germany raises the question, how much eastern Germans support pluralist competition, given the absence of pluralist practices in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). We therefore analyze the impact of eastern MPs' regime experience on their views toward pluralism. Given Germany's history, it is important to assess the commitment of political elites to pluralist principles. But the significance of this topic reaches beyond Berlin and indeed Germany. Theoretically, the unique quasi-natural experiment created by Germany's division in 1949 and its unification in 1989 allows analysts to study an important component of political culture theory: are institutions able to imbue a nation's culture with those values that undergird political institutions? Specifically, has parliamentary democracy in western Germany instilled western MPs with pluralist values? Conversely, did the state-centered norms of socialist East Germany reinforce or create antipluralist views among eastern MPs? Germany's formal division in 1949 and its unification in 1990 may be used to shed light on the institution-culture nexus by examining the influence of two fundamentally opposed systems on MPs' evaluation of pluralist principles. We first discuss the importance of pluralist competition in liberal democracies and describe, using Dahrendorf's historical analysis as a guide, how pluralism has been viewed in Germany.3 We then formulate an institutional learning argument which suggests that, while eastern MPs are expected to hold antipluralist views,

Berlin Report: Summer, 1952

despite the effects of the second world war and of the shadow cast over the city by the Cold War. About 50 per cent, of Berlin was destroyed by the ground and air fighting. Since 1945, the city has not recovered any of its functions as national capital. The Reichstag stands a roofless shell beside the newly replanted Tiergarten, while the Reichs Chancellery and most of the buildings on the Wilhelmstrasse have disappeared. Since 1945 also, Berlin has been a peculiar victim of the hardening of administrative lines in Germany; eloquent testimony both to the immediate post-war belief that four power harmony could be preserved and to the total failure to consider the risks and consequences if it could not. Consequently Berlin has been gradually cut off from its hinterland. It is separated from its friends by 120 miles of hostile territory. Most seriously, it was divided in 1945 by an illogical administrative line which has resulted, with the development of the Cold War, in the progressive tightening of the stronghold of the Soviet Zone on the city. The exits are now patrolled more effectively by East German police and Russian sentries than at any time since the blockade. Perhaps only the degree to which the life of the eastern and western sectors of the city are separated by the Cold War line has been exaggerated by western press reports. Unlike Vienna, Berlin is by no means a city throughout which one can move without inconvenience and practically without fear. On the other hand, the prevailing impression that the sector boundary is as closely guarded and as infrequently trespassed as the border between the Eastern Zone and the Federal Republic is simply not true. Connecting eastern and western Berlin are said to be 273 streets, and the physical problem of enforcing Kontrolle may well be the factor which has deterred the Russians from attempting to seal off this chink in the Iron Curtain. In many cases the sector boundary runs down the centre of a street: in the Stresemannstrasse, for example, one can stand in front of a quiet shop in the western sector and watch the food queues on the opposite pavement. Although communist whims may alter the situation at any moment, the only form of inter-sector control at present is a superficial checking of cars. This is done, well back on both sides of the line, not by Soviet and Allied troops but by eastern and western German police, and simply as an attempt to check the flourishing smuggling traffic. Few trams run across the dividing line, but each hour thousands of Berliners travel