Posted on 11/19/2009 1:48:12 PM PST by AJKauf
Most Germans—polls show, despite current economic difficulties, do not regret the fall of the Wall, the collapse of the Communist regime in the East, and the eventual reunification of their country. What doubts there are, however, come from the ranks of the Western Left, who seem to have the ability to regularly air their arguments in the op-ed pages of The New York Times. I read one such report in the paper’s pages while visiting Berlin, written by Katrin Bennhold and titled “Lessons From the Former East Germany.”
Bennhold beings by noting that “Like most people, I had slept through the fall of the Berlin Wall.” At the time, her parents, 60’s activists, sided with the millions of protesters gathered 20 years ago in East Berlin, who were demanding what she knows was “freedom and democratic rights.” But as activists of the Left, they feared that the collapse of the DDR (German Democratic Republic) would lead to the leaders of the West cutting apart the welfare state, and adopting a free-market capitalism influenced by what she calls the Reagan-Thatcher model. Their fear, she writes, was achieved. The West “simply swallowed East and in the process discarded 40 years of mostly bad but some good policies.”
She proceeds to identify those “good” policies that existed in the Communist East. They include child care policies that included a “network of day care centers,” paid maternity leave, and women who worked in various jobs.....
(Excerpt) Read more at pajamasmedia.com ...
they have a word for it...Ostalgie....a sort of nostalgic longing for life in the former DDR (sort of like how people here think of the 1950’s only in terms of Happy Days, record hops and malt shops)
Only Fonzie never shot anyone trying to escape from Arnolds
We could learn from our wise eastern neighbors, ja!
I recall reading about a horror camp tourists could visit to be yelled at by former East European guards. Not so much to mock it as to make it apparent to people just what they had endured.
They say a border wall can’t be built but seeing the Great Wall of China has to show Obama it CAN be done if the will to do so is there.
I wish we could send them all back in time, and make them live there.
I’d love to ask these nostalgic revisionists whether the 171 people who were murdered by the State trying to cross the Wall were one of those wonderful things about the East that they miss.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find only things evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelogus
Katrin Bennhold’s parents must’ve rotted their brains from sixties drugs. How they could favor the falling of the wall and then later claim in some ways that was a bad thing is beyond comprehension.
I was in the divided Germanys in the mid seventies. What a nightmare for the East Germans. East Berlin looked like WWII had just ended a year earlier instead of 30 years earlier. Crumbling building, everything stark and grey and lifeless, barbed wire and graffiti covering huge portions of the wall through the city, etc.
On our ‘tour’ we were repeatedly driven past the best of East Berlin, from different streets, I guess in hopes that we would not realize we were seeing the same few buildings that looked halfway decent. People were a mess — their clothing raggedy, they needed dental work.
Visting USSR weeks later I found the same thing — all of it grey and dark and dismal and pathetic.
Yes, everyone had a ‘job’ — if you think taxi drivers earning the same as doctors was a good thing. And little old ladies in babushkas sweeping streets with 19th century brooms was an eye-opener too. Housing for everyone — yes, shared ‘apartments’ — ‘projects’ was more like it — with overcrowded conditions and families sharing bathrooms, etc.
On the other side of Berlin, life was mostly as in the West — upbeat, colorful, lots of commerce and smiling healthy looking people. When we were there at the Berlin Hilton one morning the lobby was abuzz with news that a notable East German orchestra conductor had escaped to West Berlin the night before. Those in the west were elated and the tourists along with them.
The author of this article should’ve had the thrill of living in the old, divided Berlin. I seriously doubt MOST people who favored the fall of the Wall have changed their minds now. Her parents must be some sick aberration.
Westlich von der Wand, wo Herzen sind frei
Westlich von der Wand dein Herz kann zu mir kommen
Und in meinen Armen halten Sie fest, dass
Sie werden vergessen, die Dunkelheit der Nacht
Die Welt weiß, über die Traurigkeit, und wir sind nicht allein
Westlich der Mauer, die bald fallen wird und Sie nach Hause kommenWayne Shanklin
Sure, because the East German government supported leftist causes all over the World. No more East German money.
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