The concern, if I understood, is that children born since 1989 are totally ignorant of what DDR and living in it was; a complete black hole in this younger generation.
As for me, our family lived in West-Berlin in the 70s and we paid a couple of short visits to the East (through the famous checkpoint Charlie); you had to in order to visit places like Unter Den Linden, Alexander Platz, Pergamon Museum or anything East of Brandenburger Tor.
This is the only place where I saw steam locomotives in regular operation. The streets were almost empty of cars compared to the Western side. It was just a few kilometers away from where we lived at the time (Wedding, the neighborhood where Nanne lives today), but it felt like a complete time warp.
The East TV channels were full of black and white Russian war movies, and also a few old French movies, amazingly enough. Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time.
That, in my view, is a concern with the attached weight of wanting children to have the same interpretation of the past as the one one gained. The problem here is that IMO, on one hand, this lack of knowledge of the younger generations stems from a lack of interest to seek out information (no emotional investment like for those who lived at the time); on the other hand, it is not born from lack of available information. For example, German filmmakers and TV movie producers produce films which have the evil of the GDR as plot element every year (some of it good, some of it crude Wessie caricature).
steam locomotives in regular operation
That's an interesting episode, BTW. Steam locos, and coal-fired at that, were brought back after the Second Oil Crisis became one in the Eastern Bloc, too (AFAIK because the Soviet Union wanted to sell closer to world market prices, too). It was a boon for Western railfans - who became a recognised welcome source of convertible forex for the regime... *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
