Free Republic

Welcome to Asia’s Latest Organic Retreat: North Korea Charlie Campbell / Dandong and Beijing July 29, 2016 For many Chinese, much of North Korea's allure is its resemblance to a simpler China, harking back to a time before mass industrialization and commercialization New Yorkers flock to ashrams in the Appalachian Mountains, Europeans to refurbished hermitages in the Umbrian countryside, but where do Asians go to get away from it all? Sure, there are Balinese yoga retreats and meditation centers run by Nepali beekeepers. But for a growing number of Chinese, the ultimate escape is the ultimate in oppression: North Korea....

Die-hard Marxists and others raised in formerly Communist east Germany feel Europe's sovereign debt crisis has vindicated their once-ridiculed warnings about the perils of unbridled capitalism. .... European leaders struck a deal with private banks on Thursday to try to contain the debt crisis but doubts about the global financial system linger in Berlin, a city split by the Cold War that has witnessed an improbable revival of interest in Karl Marx since the financial crisis began in 2008. "These banks have a ludicrous business model and it's extremely dangerous for us all," said Sahra Wagenknecht, a member of parliament...

The biggest number of Westerners arrived from Austria and Switzerland. Some were Communists, others had worked at institutions in Soviet-occupied Austria that were later closed. Many were scientists and medics whose expertise the GDR needed. "SOMETHING PRECIOUS" Rapoport, a pediatrician, was one of them. Born in 1912 in the former German colony of Cameroon, she grew up in Hamburg and studied medicine but emigrated to the United States in 1938 because the Nazis wouldn't let her complete her studies. Her family has Jewish roots and the horrors of fascism turned her toward Communism. "I was quite religious when I was...

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.

A wave of nostalgia for the former GDR is sweeping parts of Berlin. Eighteen years after reunification, knowledge of the communist regime is fading, and its most unpleasant aspects are beginning to be glossed over. 18 years after German reunification, the Wall that once divided the country in two has all but vanished. In Eastern Berlin, memories of the former communist state remain vivid – as evidenced in one local pub. The bar's sign, which reads "come to us or we will come to you," is a slogan once used by the East German secret police. The interior is decorated...

BERLIN (Reuters Life!) - Visitors to the German capital who are disappointed by the scant remains of the Berlin Wall can get a taste of the old days at a new communist-style hotel which revives the atmosphere of East Germany. In a multi-storey concrete block near the city's eastern train station, former communist leader Erich Honecker, wearing his trademark thick black glasses, stares down at guests from the walls of each of the 39 rooms. Garish orange patterned curtains and retro brown sofas clash with lime green walls. Plastic plants and old-style lamps stand by windows overlooking more concrete blocks...

A mammoth statue of Vladimir Lenin is to be rescued from its woodland resting place and reinstated in Berlin. The 62ft monument once loomed over Lenin Square, now United Nations Square, in East Berlin but was dragged off its pedestal under tight police guard 14 years ago. It was then cut into 125 pieces and buried in woods on the edge of the city. But so-called "ostalgie" hunters, those wistful for the communist era, recently discovered its secret grave and have been chiselling bits from its red granite surface as souvenirs. Attempts to protect the statue by covering it in...

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German man has canned the noxious-smelling exhaust fumes of East Germany's cult Trabant car and is doing a brisk trade selling the scent to those nostalgic for the former Communist state. "The smell is something very special and scarce nowadays," said Thorsten Jahn, whose cans of "Trabi" exhaust sell online for 3.98 euros ($4.81). "I wanted to preserve the past in an original way." Fifteen years since reunification, nostalgia for East Germany has been running strong as rosy memories of the communist state's social safety nets, holiday camps and quaint consumer products like the tiny, box-like...

Why Central Europe’s young are dancing, dressing, and drinking as their parents did before 1989. When they were young, they longed to wear real Levi’s blue jeans and thirsted for Coca Cola. Today, many East-Central Europeans are switching back to the brand names of their youth. They wear communist-era sneakers, dance to the synth-sounds of aging 1980s pop bands, and drink cheap Coke imitations. A wave of nostalgia for the cheap and often shoddily made consumer products of the long-gone communist era is sweeping across this region. In eastern Germany, they call it Ostalgia, a play on the German word...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Fourteen years and a trillion euros after reunification one in five Germans would like to see the barrier that split the country during the Cold War put back, a survey has found. A poll by the Forsa institute released on Wednesday found a quarter of western Germans wishing the 15 million east Germans were cut off again by the Berlin Wall, living in a different state, while 12 percent of eastern Germans wanted out of the united Germany. Many westerners said they were disgruntled because they have had to foot the bill for reunification -- 24 percent...

GERMANS’ seemingly insatiable desire to relive the hardships of the communist era is about to find a new outlet in a "theme hotel" in the former female political prison of the old Stasi secret police.The themes on offer to the paying guests at Schloss Hoheneck are pretty much what the Stasi offered to its captives: deprivation, discomfort and "abysmal food". The towering fortress-style place of incarceration is not dissimilar to the infamous Colditz Castle, where prominent Allied POWs were incarcerated during the Second World War. For £66 a night Bernhard Freiberger is offering "dissident breaks". No "wellness" or hydro-therapy cures...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Former political prisoners have voiced outrage at a German company's scheme to sell tourists an authentic jail experience in what was former Communist East Germany's biggest women's prison. Thousands of women suffered torture and repression behind the walls of Hoheneck castle, a medieval fort perched on a hill above the town of Stollberg in Saxony, used as a jail for political dissidents from 1950 until 1989. Now German company Artemis GmbH, which purchased the five-hectare (12.4-acre) estate in 2003, is advertising the chance to spend a night like a prisoner, eating sloppy food and being deprived of...

BRUSSELS, Belgium, Aug. 11 (UPI) -- The Berlin Wall may have been toppled 15 years ago and most of the countries that languished behind it are now fully-fledged members of NATO and the European Union, but this has done little to stem the rising tide of nostalgia for communist times in Central and Eastern Europe. Only a handful of diehard Stalinists would prefer to trade in their Trabants for their Volkswagens and swap their hard-fought freedom for one-party rule, but from Estonia on the shores of the Baltic Sea to Slovenia on the Adriatic coast, there is a renewed interest...

A western German businessman who bought the rights to the official emblem of communist East Germany defended his move Tuesday, saying critics were jealous they hadn't thought of it before he did. Manfred Jansen paid the German patent office $330 for the right to demand royalties from anyone who puts the emblem -- a hammer and compass set into a wreath of rye -- on T-shirts, cigarette lighters, belts and a host of other products. "I'm just a businessman with an agency dealing in nice logos. I have no political motives," Jansen told Reuters as news of his purchase sparked...

The German Democratic Republic is alive and well, and better than it ever really was, in "Good bye, Lenin!" THESE DAYS IT IS HARD TO TELL that Berlin was a divided city. There's hardly a trace of the Wall left, save for a block strip. On Potsdamer Platz, once known as a no-man's-land with concrete barriers and barbed wire, there's a Starbucks, McDonald's, and an Eddie Bauer. In the heart of the platz is the Sony multiplex theater. On my trip to Berlin last December, "Finding Nemo" had just premiered there, complete with a red carpet and an after-party featuring...

BERLIN - East Germans who were in their mid-teens when the Berlin Wall came down still identify with their communist upbringings and still remember the "good things" about Stalinism, according to a startling new study. The study of some 1,200 East Germans who are now 30 years old showed they have become disenchanted with unified Germany and have lost all optimism for the future. The study by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, used a pool of respondents who were first singled out in 1987. At that time they were 14-year-old school pupils in the Dresden area of communist East Germany. The...

EISENHUETTENSTADT, Germany - 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-GDR T-shirts, or they collect Trabants, the rattling two-cylinder car that East Germans waited years to buy, or they...

The 'Ost' wasn't all that bad after all - was it? A scene from Goodbye, Lenin! The people who used to be West Germans call them Ossis, the arriviste capitalists from the eastern (or "Ost") side of the Wall. In 1989, there was no mistaking them. Ossis wore trademark stonewash denim, long out of fashion in the west. Ossis had terrible haircuts and rough manners. They also cost a lot. In the first decade after the Wall fell, Germany spent $US800 billion ($A1100 billion) on reunification, equivalent to a $US12,000 "solidarity tax" on every Western citizen. They didn't even seem...

Hankering in the former East Germany for a return to the supposed simplicity of life under communist rule has been challenged by a 73-year-old woman's account of eight years of rape and torture she suffered when she was a political prisoner. Erika Riemann was 14 when she was imprisoned by by the communist regime in. She had defaced a portrait of Stalin hanging in her school by painting a red bow over his moustache with her mother's lipstick. In three East German prisons, including a former Nazi concentration camp, she was repeatedly raped, starved and beaten. Finally she was forced...

<p>A boy peers over one of the last remaining sections of the Berlin Wall.</p> <p>When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, few would have thought it would be replaced by a 47-kilometer (29-mile) plastic screen.</p> <p>But that is what arts promoter Christof Blaesius proposes to build for 2006 to coincide with Germany hosting the World Cup.</p>