NY Times: Warm, Fuzzy Feelings for East Germany's Gray Old Days

[La_Serpiente]

Warm, Fuzzy Feelings for East Germany's Gray Old Days

EISENHÜTTENSTADT, Germany, Jan. 6 — This town is the perfect setting for the strange mood of nostalgia that seems to be taking hold in Germany lately, even if a Socialist utopia from the Stalinist former German Democratic Republic (otherwise known as East Germany) does not seem a natural inspirer of warm and fuzzy feelings about the past.

But, strange as it is, a wave of what is called ostalgie (ost meaning east in German) has become a phenomenon in this country. People wear born-in-the-G.D.R. T-shirts, or they collect Trabants, the rattling two-cylinder cars that East Germans waited years to buy, or they go on line to be contestants on the "Ossi-Quiz," all questions relating to East German pop culture.

Here in Eisenhüttenstadt — Steel Mill Town — a few miles from the Polish border, ostalgie has been provided with its own museum, officially known as the Documentation Center on Everyday Life in the G.D.R. It is just down the road from the giant steel mill built here in the early 1950's as an industrial showpiece.

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Warm, Fuzzy Feelings for East Germany's Gray Old Days

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[cprise]

1. My sister is waiting years to buy a car too

At 20 yrs, she hasn't been able to find a job, you see.

But once she finally saves enough to buy a 12 yr. old American clunker, none of our economists will have considered her to have "waited" to get what she needed.