I'm new... (hell, America, agnostic, divorce, point of view) - Page 2

Sunstone · #11 11-19-2005, 05:27 PM

Welcome to the Forums!

Amlaith · #12 11-19-2005, 05:37 PM

Berlin. Well, there 's a quite a lot which I could tell about my birth city. I spent six years of my life in this town and returned to it every year to visit my mother. I watched from the distance how this city changed over the past ten years. Through all these years my relationship to this city was and is still difficult. So difficult that it's even hard to express it in my language. Berlin is confusing. It tastes like a lie.

Everybody there is so anxious about erasing the wound, which was caused by the division. After all, I think we stayed at the top of the problems. I often visited "die neuen Bundesländer" (the new "Laender"). Something I observed was that the generation of those who are now in their thirties and forties glorify the past. I saw as a young child the streets of cities in Saxony. My grandfather said it looked like if there was a civil war. A friend of mine told me when his grandmother (who lived at that time in Chemnitz, the former Karl-Marx-Stadt) visited him the first time (after he had left GDR in his youth), he bought her some strawberries. She broke out in tears, because she hadn't eaten strawberries for such a long time. It was pure luxury.

I think I can understand their situation. Many of them are unemployed, especially in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, though many of them have studied. In the former GDR the state was everything. It took care of you (of course in a negative way, too; think of Stasi). And now many of them must find their own way through modern life. They see the effects of globalism and turbo capitalism and are afraid of such developments. They've grown up with the thoughts of Marx and Lenin.
Otherwise there was a vanquisher's mindset in the west.

Although many things have changed over the last years, I believe there's a lot we've to do. There a still walls in the minds of the people. It's saddening me very much.