BALTIMORE (AP) — Another tight game, another loss for the Cincinnati Bengals. It's a frustrating pattern that has put the struggling team in danger of missing the playoffs despite the outstanding play of Joe Burrow and Ja'Marr Chase.
For the second time in two games against the division rival Baltimore Ravens, the Bengals blew a big lead Thursday night and lost 35-34. Cincinnati was on the cusp of reaching .500 following an 0-3 start, but those hopes vanished as quickly as its 14-point lead in the third quarter.
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Cincinnati Bengals head coach Zac Taylor pauses as he speaks after an NFL football game against the Baltimore Ravens, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in Baltimore. The Ravens won 35-34. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
Baltimore Ravens linebacker Odafe Oweh, left, pressures Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow (9) as he passes the ball during the first half of an NFL football game, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)
Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Ja'Marr Chase (1) catches the ball as Baltimore Ravens linebacker Trenton Simpson (23) and safety Marcus Williams (32) move in during the first half of an NFL football game, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)
Baltimore Ravens linebacker Odafe Oweh, left, pressures Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow (9) as he passes the ball during the first half of an NFL football game, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)
Cincinnati Bengals tight end Tanner Hudson (87) misses a two-point conversion as Baltimore Ravens safety Ar'Darius Washington (29) defends and Baltimore Ravens safety Marcus Williams (32) looks on during the second half of an NFL football game, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)
Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Ja'Marr Chase (1) catches a touchdown pass over Baltimore Ravens cornerback Nate Wiggins (2) and safety Ar'Darius Washington (29) during the second half of an NFL football game, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in Baltimore. The Ravens won 35-34. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)
In their previous game against Baltimore last month, the Bengals (4-6) frittered away a 10-point lead in the fourth quarter before losing 41-38 in overtime.
In this one, Cincinnati led 21-7 before running back Chase Brown had the ball stripped and lost a fumble that Baltimore recovered at the Cincy 31. Five plays later, the Ravens (7-3) scored a touchdown to ignite their comeback.
“We gave them seven points right there with the fumble,” Bengals coach Zac Taylor said. “It kind of went back and forth from there.”
And when the teams got done trading touchdowns, the Ravens were one point better after Cincinnati failed on a 2-point conversion with 38 seconds remaining.
Burrow went 34 for 56 for 428 yards and four touchdowns, three of them to Chase, who racked up a whopping 264 yards receiving on 11 catches and scored on plays of 67, 70 and 5 yards.
In two games against Baltimore, Burrow has thrown for 820 yards and nine TDs. Chase has amassed 457 yards and five touchdowns.
And incredibly, Cincinnati went 0-2 against its AFC North foe. Burrow and Chase have been magnificent this season, yet their haughty numbers are overshadowed these two digits: 4 and 6.
“It’s crazy,” Chase said. “I would never in a million years expect me to play this well and he play this well and still have the record like this.”
Cincinnati's inability to make a lead stand up is painfully obvious. The Bengals fell to Kansas City on a last-second field goal; lost to Washington despite getting 324 yards passing and three touchdowns from Burrow; and lost to Philadelphia when the Eagles scored the game's final 20 points.
Worst of all: the twin collapses against Baltimore.
“It’s sickening that this has happened twice to us,” Taylor said. “We got to find a way to close out these games.”
Chase has a knack for getting open against the Ravens, and Burrow usually gets him the ball. But with the outcome hanging in the balance, Burrow's throw on the 2-point conversion whistled past the lesser known Tanner Hudson.
Asked if he was open on the play, Chase replied, “Yeah, I'm always open.”
Chase proved to be a reliable target with the Bengals forced to play without injured wide receiver Tee Higgins. But Cincinnati was virtually defenseless against Lamar Jackson and his talented band of receivers.
“It sucks losing to those guys,” Chase said. “But if we keep playing and win, we’ll be where we want to be.”
The Bengals have very little margin for error with only seven games to go. Can this team rebound and make the playoffs?
Chase believes so.
“Yeah, I do. One hundred percent,” he said. “We showed it tonight, what we can do.”
And what they can't do, which is make a lead stand up.
“We just got to figure out a way to make that last play to win,” Taylor said.
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Cincinnati Bengals head coach Zac Taylor pauses as he speaks after an NFL football game against the Baltimore Ravens, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in Baltimore. The Ravens won 35-34. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)
Baltimore Ravens linebacker Odafe Oweh, left, pressures Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow (9) as he passes the ball during the first half of an NFL football game, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)
Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Ja'Marr Chase (1) catches the ball as Baltimore Ravens linebacker Trenton Simpson (23) and safety Marcus Williams (32) move in during the first half of an NFL football game, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)
Baltimore Ravens linebacker Odafe Oweh, left, pressures Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow (9) as he passes the ball during the first half of an NFL football game, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)
Cincinnati Bengals tight end Tanner Hudson (87) misses a two-point conversion as Baltimore Ravens safety Ar'Darius Washington (29) defends and Baltimore Ravens safety Marcus Williams (32) looks on during the second half of an NFL football game, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in Baltimore. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)
Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Ja'Marr Chase (1) catches a touchdown pass over Baltimore Ravens cornerback Nate Wiggins (2) and safety Ar'Darius Washington (29) during the second half of an NFL football game, Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024, in Baltimore. The Ravens won 35-34. (AP Photo/Nick Wass)
BERLIN (AP) — Like many other young women living in communist East Germany, Solveig Leo thought nothing about juggling work and motherhood. The mother of two was able to preside over a large state-owned farm in the northeastern village of Banzkow because childcare was widely available.
Contrast that with Claudia Huth, a mother of five, who grew up in capitalist West Germany. Huth quit her job as a bank clerk when she was pregnant with her first child and led a life as a traditional housewife in the village of Egelsbach in Hesse, raising the kids and tending to her husband, who worked as a chemist.
Both Leo and Huth fulfilled roles that in many ways were typical for women in the vastly different political systems that governed Germany durings its decades of division following the country’s defeat in World War II in 1945.
As Germany celebrates the 35th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989 — and the country’s reunification less than a year later on Oct. 3, 1990 — many in Germany are reflecting on how women’s lives that have diverged so starkly under communism and capitalism have become much more similar again — though some differences remain even today.
“In West Germany, women — not all, but many — had to fight for their right to have a career,” said Clara Marz, the curator of an exhibition about women in divided Germany for the Federal Foundation for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Germany.
Women in East Germany, meanwhile, often had jobs — though that was something that “they had been ordered from above to do,” she added.
Built in 1961, the Wall stood for 28 years at the front line of the Cold War between the Americans and the Soviets. It was built by the communist regime to cut off East Germans from the supposed ideological contamination of the West and to stem the tide of people fleeing East Germany.
Today only a few stretches of the 156.4-kilometer (97.2-mile) barrier around the capitalist exclave of West Berlin remain, mostly as a tourist attraction.
“All the heavy industry was in the west, there was nothing here,” Leo, who is now 81 years old, said during a recent interview looking back at her life as a woman under communism. “East Germany had to pay war reparations to the Soviet Union. Women needed to work our own way out of that misery.”
By contrast, Leo said, women in the West didn't need to work because they were “spoiled by the Marshall Plan” — the United States’ generous reconstruction plan that poured billions of dollars into West Germany and other European countries after the war.
In capitalist West Germany, the economy recovered so quickly after the total devastation of WWII that people soon started talking of a Wirtschaftswunder, or “economic miracle,” that brought them affluence and stability less than 10 years after the war.
That economic success, however, indirectly hampered women’s quest for equal rights. Most West German women stayed at home and were expected to take care of their household while their husbands worked. Religion, too, played a much bigger role than in atheist East Germany, confining women to traditional roles as caregivers of the family.
Mothers who tried to break out of these conventions and took on jobs were infamously decried as Rabenmütter, or uncaring moms who put work over family.
Not all West German women perceived their traditional roles as restrictive.
“I always had this idea to be with my children, because I loved being with them," said Huth, now 69. “It never really occurred to me to go to work.”
More than three decades after Germany’s unification, a new generation of women is barely aware of the different lives their mothers and grandmothers led depending on which part of the country they lived in. For most, combining work and motherhood has also become the normal way of life.
Hannah Fiedler, an 18-year-old high school graduate from Berlin, said the fact that her family lived in East Germany during the decades of the country's division has no impact on her life today.
“East or West — it's not even a topic in our family anymore,” she said, as she sat on a bench near a thin, cobble-stoned path in the capital's Mitte neighborhood, which marks the former course of the Berlin Wall in the then-divided city.
She also said that growing up, she had not experienced any disadvantages because she's female.
“I'm white and privileged — for good or worse — I don't expect any problems when I enter the working world in the future,” she said.
Some small differences between the formerly divided parts of Germany linger on. In the former East, 74% of women are working, compared to 71.5% in the West, according to a 2023 study by the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung foundation.
Childcare is also still more available in the former East than in the West.
In 2018, 57% of children under the age of 3 were looked after in a childcare facility in the eastern state of Saxony. That compares with 27% in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia and 44% in Hamburg and Bremen, according to Germany's Federal Statistical Office.
Germany as a whole trails behind some other European countries when it comes to gender equality.
Only 31.4% lawmakers in Germany's national parliament are female, compared to 41% in Belgium's parliament, 43.6% in Denmark, 45% in Norway and 45.6% in Sweden.
Nonetheless, Leo, the 81-year-old farmer from former East Germany, is optimistic that eventually women all over the country will have the same opportunities.
“I can’t imagine that there are any women who don’t like to be independent,” she said.
Jan M. Olsen contributed reporting from Copenhagen.
Seamstresses work th the VEB clothing factory "Fortschritt",1987 in Berlin. (Zentralbild/DPA via AP)
Women work in the former East German Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft (LPG) an 'Agricultural Production Cooperative' in Golzow on April 13, 1981. (Heinrich Sanden/DPA via AP)
Mealtime at the kindergarten on Wieckerstrasse in the Berlin district of Hohenschönhausen, in November 1987. (Zentralbid/DPA via AP)
Clara Marz an Organizer of an exhibition about women works on the photos in her office in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Clara Marz an Organizer of an exhibition about women attends an interview with the Associated Press in her office in Berlin, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm shows an old photo of herself from her youth during her interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm attends an interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm feeds her horse after the interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Solveig Leo, 81, former head of a large state-owned farm looks at her old photos album during her interview with the Associated Press in the northeastern village of Banzkow, Germany, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Claudia Huth walks in front of her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Claudia Huth shows old photos of her children and herself in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
A repro of a photo pictured in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024 shows Claudia Huth and her children. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Claudia Huth poses next to a painting showing herself and painted by her son in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Claudia Huth shows an old photo of her family and herself in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Repro of a photo pictured in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024 shows Claudia Huth and her children. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
Claudia Huth poses next to a painting showing herself and painted by her son in her house in Egelsbach, Germany, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
