That's a better wording of a view I was critical of in the diary:

The "unmet expectations" meme is a common way to explain away Ostalgie -- and IMO both an ignorant and hypocritical one. There is a rather wide gap between believing Helmut Kohl's election slogan about "Flourishing landscapes", and finding oneself without a job for 10 years, while weed is flourishing instead within the perimeter of the factory you worked at.

In the above, I am also alluding to another version of the theory, with speaks about unmet promises: that is, the theory that an overwhelming majority of East Germans believed that election slogan. However, I don't believe even that.

If I remember how people or I myself felt here, it was not at all a rosy image as above indicated. At the end of the eighties, Eastern Bloc economies were in decline. (And East Germans remember that: see the third diagram I showed in the diary.) The predominant feeling was that things will get worse before they get better, and that there will be big transformations. In East Germany, the hope for a turnaround may have been stronger due to the money expected to flow in from the West, but, still.

But what many people got was not merely a failure to gain something without sacrificing something, not merely job insecurity. But a depression. The disappearance or massive shrinking of most existing companies, with not much new to replace them. Meanwhile, specially in East Germany, a brain drain: those who could and felt able did not wait for good-paying jobs to arrive, but used their freedom to move to move such jobs in the West. On a massive scale: 3 million by 2002. (Net migration was less, under 1.5 million back then; but a sizable part of those moving in from the West were retired.)

I also want to argue that Ostalgie itself cannot be reduced to the economic dimension only. There is the loss of culture (and with that identity). You have to consider that after Reunification, everything from brands in the supermarket through street marks to television was adopted from West Germany. For example, the most famous symbol of Ostalgie was the Ampelmännchen, the figure of the walking/standing man in traffic lights for pedestrians: there was a broad movement requesting that it be kept, fighting federal demands for standardisation (and ultimately winning the right after a long fight).

I'm sure one can find something similar across the former Eastern Bloc

There are different complications. For one, the economic collapses and neolib reforms went on in the other countries without a Reunification with a West that is at least investing massively in infrastructure. On the other hand, while the heir of the SED developed into a hard-leftist opposition party, the heirs of most other 'communist' parties developed into more or less corrupt, more or even more 'reformed', at times election-winning parties; and thus, the reflection on the past is coloured by the view of the present in wholly different ways. Finally, the disappearance of old brands etc. wasn't total, so the equivalents of sentimental Ostalgie are less pronounced.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}