Sorry for being so negative, but I do think it is about a feeling of selfworth and usefullness. Which is most easly achieved by feeling a productive member of society - which means, being in employment.

Both selfworth and usefullness, where enourmously undermined after the wall fell and the hordes from the West, Besserwessied the East. I experienced this it myself. Even though I was from the West, but I moved to East Germany / Leipzig in 1991 and people did treat me differently when they realised I was from the West. Which sometimes took them a while. But for the colonial Wessis I encountered, I only have contempt and I was one of them.

It is the small things that give one the realisation of selfworth and very often it is still being connected to your work place and as you all know - everybody in the GDR had the security of life-time employment. The responsibility was with the state and the state took good care of you - for the cost of your liberties. But now, since the liberties are achieved, the responsibilities rest with the individuals, social structures don't work the same way and different working styles were seem to be needed to be learned. But the way it was being enforced, was out of the control of the individual. The carpet they stood on was pulled under their feet - laying on the floor there were being lied to by the politicans.

"I can see blossoming landscapes" Helmut Kohl promised this but he made damn sure, that it was on West German terms.

I still have difficulties to understand why my friends vote for the PDS, but in the end, I would have to vote for them as well, if I trusted Wahl-o-mat
I just cannot. I have seen their politicians promise as much as the CDU, but the Realos in the Greens are still my choice.

Much worse.  It's not just going from full employment to 18% unemployment. In actual fact total employment has utterly collapsed, the unemployment numbers hide that since they reflect a far smaller workforce. E. Germany has lost massive numbers of working age people to migration, it has also seen large scale early retirement. IIRC the reduction of total employment is on the order of fifty percent but I'd have to check that.

In general the critique should include the disastrous decision to convert the E. German mark on a 1-1 basis and to raise wages to an almost W. German level.  If you take an already struggling enterprise and choose to massively hike its costs overnight, it will die. That's what happened on a large scale in E. Germany. Not that it would have been easy to do anything else - people might have voted with their feet, but still that's a major reason why in many ways the E. German economy has done so much worse than those of the new member states.

Accepted by economists? I'm no expert on economics or economists' opinions but I'll say this, Marx predicted ever falling wages for all except an ever smaller number of capitalists. He was blatantly wrong about that as was pointed out as early as the late nineteenth century by Bernstein. Standards of living for average people may have stagnated in many advanced Western economies over recent years but they are still far, far, higher than they were in Marx's time.  The only part of Marx's take on capitalism that I've seen praised in recent years is his highly impressionistic description of globalization in the Manifesto - and that's not really a 'critique', if anything the opposite.  Like the good child of the Enlightenment that he was Marx believed in Progress, he saw capitalism as the chief motor of Progress.  It's just that his deterministic version of historical teleology argued that capitalism would inevitably collapse and turn into socialism.

I also don't understand what you  mean by capitalism never existing. If by that you mean that the abstract model has never existed - sure. But no model ever does, they are just heuristic tools. In the messy reality of this world we have had various forms of capitalism which have functioned in different ways.