Kasz216 said:
Well mostly. There are some people like Hunter who are too young to remember how bad things were then and are drawn to the general "glory" that the USSR had as a super power. It's why countries like the Ukraine and Georgia can't get into the EU soon enough. They see it as the only way to save themselves from Russia again. |
I think that is why Hunter said you should go to East Europe if you have a chance. It is true that their is a group of youngsters who look trough rosses glasses and think before the Berlin Wall fell everything was better. Only their is a group of elder who lived before the Berlin Wall Fell who also miss the old days. They got their freedom but also many lost their jobs and didn't found an job anymore. Some people prefer job above freedom. They got fucked by the state in those days but they feel the same now about their current state government/EU.
You find enough articles about it aswell:
Glorification of the German Democratic Republic is on the rise two decades after the Berlin Wall fell. Young people and the better off are among those rebuffing criticism of East Germany as an "illegitimate state." In a new poll, more than half of former eastern Germans defend the GDR.
The life of Birger, a native of the state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania in northeastern Germany, could read as an all-German success story. The Berlin Wall came down when he was 10. After graduating from high school, he studied economics and business administration in Hamburg, lived in India and South Africa, and eventually got a job with a company in the western German city of Duisburg. Today Birger, 30, is planning a sailing trip in the Mediterranean. He isn't using his real name for this story, because he doesn't want it to be associated with the former East Germany, which he sees as "a label with negative connotations."
And yet Birger is sitting in a Hamburg cafe, defending the former communist country. "Most East German citizens had a nice life," he says. "I certainly don't think that it's better here." By "here," he means reunified Germany, which he subjects to questionable comparisons. "In the past there was the Stasi, and today (German Interior Minister Wolfgang) Schäuble -- or the GEZ (the fee collection center of Germany's public broadcasting institutions) -- are collecting information about us." In Birger's opinion, there is no fundamental difference between dictatorship and freedom. "The people who live on the poverty line today also lack the freedom to travel."
Birger is by no means an uneducated young man. He is aware of the spying and repression that went on in the former East Germany, and, as he says, it was "not a good thing that people couldn't leave the country and many were oppressed." He is no fan of what he characterizes as contemptible nostalgia for the former East Germany. "I haven't erected a shrine to Spreewald pickles in my house," he says, referring to a snack that was part of a the East German identity. Nevertheless, he is quick to argue with those who would criticize the place his parents called home: "You can't say that the GDR was an illegitimate state, and that everything is fine today."
End article.
Link if you want to read more of the article: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,634122-2,00.html
I didn't lived in the DDR or in East Europe so I don't experienced what it is to lived there and then. But meeting citizens from those countries and hear their stories and feel their hate/sadness says more than an history book or media can tell.
