Kultur 11

I thought this culture section was really interesting. I thought it was so interesting, not just because it was about the Berlin Wall and the history of Berlin, but because it mentioned things that I never learned before when studying the Cold War and Berlin. I had no idea there was anything known as "Ostalgie" and that people actually had nostalgia for East Germany. I was really surprised that anyone would miss things about East Germany. I was always under the impression that East Germany was a miserable, oppressive mess, but as it turns out a lot of people actually liked the way it was run. One man even said he saw the wall as protection from the fascist West, which kind of made me think that he had perhaps been a little... indoctrinated by the East. It seems to me like a lot of the nostalgia for the East may come from the fact that Easterners were brought up to like socialism and dislike and distrust the West, but that's just me. Maybe East Germany and all the machine guns and mines were fun!

Josh