How very alloyed has been the joy of reunification for East Germany. The exchange of the Communist for the capitalist tyranny of amoral materialism has brought no moral or material improvement, to say the least. How could it have done?
But there are some silver linings. By popular demand, the grammar schools have been restored in what is still the very left-wing former East Germany, just as popular demand also recently saved them in the Social Democratic heartland of North Rhine-Westphalia.
None of that here, of course. East Germany was a country in which several political parties, each purporting to draw on a very different political tradition, appeared to contest elections against each other. In reality, however, no such thing was in any meaningful sense the case. Think on.
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The whole "Ostalgie" phenomenon is understandable even if it is not completely objective. People in the West are probably surprised to hear that some folks in the old Eastern Bloc nations are not too enthused over how the transition from communism to capitalism was handled but they didn’t have to suffer “shock therapy” like the Eastern Europeans did.
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