There was a subject this morning on TV news about an exhibition somewhere in Germany where children could dress as Communist Pioneers complete with white shirts and red scarves and visit rooms full of DDR paraphernalia.

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.

[Language note: verklären is a word without English equivalent, "mis-enlighten" or "mis-explain" would be closer]

Indeed. I think you could even make a case for "romanticize" in this context.

Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine - Patti Smith

If you look for Ostalgie in the Eastern Europe, you can find some, but I guess it is easy to miss it as well. People do not mention the communist times often, and do not pick up the conversation topic gladly. They got what they wanted - a chance to catch up with examples of materially wealthy neigbours. They did not bargain for much more - witness a decade of quite massive emigration.

But in anonymous polls they can make calm rather than emotional comparisons. Do many have much to remember of the nomenclatura or Stasi? When did they start to hate plattenbau quarters, ubiquitous (though still too few?) two-stroke exhaust engines, steam locomotives? Wasn't the family and social life better? Not so many bother to compare.

many ossis wanted the material wealth of the consumer society of the West, but expected they would be able to maintain that economic security in the process. Gain something but not have to sacrifice something.

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.

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

Only a quick reply now on the last: Sahra Wahrenknecht was one of the two 'stars' of the PDS party (the successor of the East German state 'communist' party SED, and the East German one of the two predecessors of today's Left Party): provocative, passionate about ideology, good speaker, young, and good-looking. Thus, she is both not representative (as being a prominent intellectual/party politician; and being more the face than the holder of power within the party) and representative (of at least that half of the 57% positive about the GDR who vote for the PDS/Left Party).

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.

Lives of desperation are no less quiet than before. And not only for East Europeans.

Did suicide statistics change in East Germany? I heard that in Baltic countries or Hungary they went worse.

To indulge in my superficial maleness, she's hot and has a Rosa Luxemburg thing going, and uses it too.

Non-Superficially, I find her a little too, dare I say, Stalinist for my taste.  I think that is in fact detrimental to the party.  The one thing Die Linke really needs to do is shake off the perception that it is the SED reincarnate.  My opinion is that it is one of the main barriers to gaining more votes and party support from people who are left but eye the party with suspicion.  The old dinosaurs of the SED and PDS, and the new dogmatic idealogues like Sarah, do not help in those efforts.

"Schiller sprach zu Goethe, Steck in dem Arsch die Flöte! Goethe sagte zu Schiller, Mein Arsch ist kein Triller!"