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'Empires' article inaccurate

To the editor,

"Hitler, Hiroshima and Nagasaki" did send a chill down my spine. Shouldn't it have been "Harry, Hiroshima and Nagasaki"? I always thought President Truman ordered the Enola Gay to drop its deadly load. But I know now - it's my "feelings of insecurity and, most of all, the loss of once being a superpower." Thank you for getting my view of history straightened out!

There are a few more things in your article which I feel are desperately crying for a comment. "Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder recently shifted his government back to Berlin for the first time since Hitler's regime in 1945."

The decision was made a long time ago, and it's not Gerhard Schroeder's government but that of the German people. How kind of you to compare the German capital to the U of A - Pima Community College would have sufficed. Bonn had already been a joke as a Westgerman capital, and it meant a lot for Eastgerman people to have the new government in Berlin , on "our" side. If it makes you happy, Germany is far away from being reunified. Do you recall your History 101? Does "Civil War" or "Reconstruction" ring a bell? If a took a long time to become one country again after four years of fighting, how long do you think it is going to take after 40 years of separation?

The heart of Berlin is Europe's - if not the world's biggest construction site, the city is alive 24 hours a day, there are a variety of different ethnicities, former East and Westgermany meet like in no other place, Berlin has an enormous number of theaters, museums, historic buildings and places, every year it hosts the "Love Parade" - the world's biggest open air festival - without Woodstock '99 riots, but I guess those were just young Japanese agents "wearing Army khakis and boots as a fashion statement"?

Berlin is an amazing city. The "Reichstag" building "which was once the center of the evil deeds of Hitler and his ministers..." I think it is an honor for every democratic government to be housed in a building that the Nazis set on fire.

Rainer B.M. Paetzke

American Studies sponsored student from Humboldt Universitaet Berlin