I just realized something

More than half of my life I lived in the united Germany. I live 14 years in the former GDR, now 17 in Germany.

Wow, time sure flies by. Which is a good thing in this matter.

Was that West or East?

I'm to lazy to Google.

lazy == drunk

German Democratic ( :puke: ) Republic

But, I can't really think of any specific questions. Would you be willing to give a synopsis of life East of the wall? </history nerd>

my answer to Ptah

That gives you a little inside. Not much but for starters :)

I'm not sufficiently versed on world politics to really understand the difference.

Can you elaborate?

GDR = East Germany, Communist Country.

Germany got united again in 1989. The East Germans were tired of the communist dictatorship.

I thought Frankfurt was in West Germany. Did you previously live elsewhere?

I moved a couple of times. I was born in Jena, lived in Leipzig till 1989, then moved to South Germany and moved to Frankfurt in 2002.

And to make it a bit more confusing: There is a Frankfurt in East Germany as well.

Frankfurt/Main = western Germany
Frankfur/Oder = eastern Germany

Wow. I want what you're on. :)

:)

...a cute kid, but, never-the-less, a kid....:*

but I admit that I sometimes still act like a kid :D

:loveya:

...;-)

I promise :)

You will see in September

Was the Berlin Wall part of your youth?

I grew up in a climate that waves of grain were
a natural thing.







:hi:

but repression was there all the time.
You had to wait in line for almost everything, you didn't get everything in the stores most of the time. The variety of food was small.
You had to wait for a "car" for years. If you had a phone you were priviledged (in my class of 28 pupils, only two had phones - my family was one of them).
The cities and towns were gray in gray. Everything looked depressing.

But the people were closer together. There were more communication between the people. Esp. the ones who felt repressed more than others, who were against the regime.

All the small things together made it a depressive state to live in.

word you said?

when I grew up. But you still had to watch what to say. Esp. in school. Certain teachers had the power to make it harder for you.

Your work in the library must
give your mind wings to fly above.

I want to give you a picture of mirth:



Here's a photo from my folks:



:hi:

I was able to study the profession I wanted to (I doubt very much that I would have become a librarian in the GDR), I am able to travel whereever I want to (as long as I have the money for). I can read what I want, I can eat what I want etc.

And I am able to be part of an internet community called Democratic Underground.

:hi:

I knew you were German, but I have to say that I was young when the wall fell and it didn't occur to me that you had lived in a divided Germany.

All I know about East Germany is that in 1968 my mom went to Europe and fell asleep on the train and awoke to a man in her face asking for her visa, and all she could say is "no visa."

They confiscated her Che Guavara poster and packed her back on the train west PDQ (pretty damn quick).

I saw a T-shirt on some Freeper site the other day with that classic shadow image of him and the red circle/slash over it.

Where have these people been? :shrug:

I think FR totally makes that allegory non-allegorical, ya know?

I thought he just played football. :shrug:

and I'm sure he passed the trait along to his protege.

in the match between the Greek philosophers and the German philsophers.

If memory serves, it was off an assist from Archimedes. Let's see... Archimedes passed to Heraclitus, who beat Hegel then passed back to Archimedes, who crossed to Socrates, who headed it in.

Heraclitus made the All-Star league after that game IIRC.

Hell of a midfielder.

but now you might even understand me more what I wrote you about my connection to the U.S.

I can imagine it very easily what happened to your mom. And I bet they weren't really nice to her.

And yeah, she said they were pretty rude.

She was about 20 years old, and totally scared.

But the US heard so much about the "Iron Curtain" that I'm sure she would have been scared even if they'd been nice. :shrug:

My dad went to West Germany to meet with other mathematicians who did the same math as he did (he was one of very few in the world who knew about a certain aspect of math). Anyway he had papers in his suitcase regarding this math and of course the guys at the borders had no idea what it was. AND he was the only younger man in a train full of old people. So he was searched and stuff.

I didn't realise that you were from E. Germany.

I remember when I was learning German at school, our texts books were slightly out of date and still had references to the D.D.R.

my first English text books in the West with colored pics of London :rofl:

It was interesting. The tex text books in the GDR had colored pics when it was about a communist country, but b/w depressing pics when it was about a not-communist country. The mind games they played ....

But I'm sure that at the time it wasn't.

I didn't notice so much. Just when I got older and looked at the text books again. It made me wanna puke.

I remember reading about some negativity towars "Ossies".

I guess people have other problems these days.

I don't know how it is in the Eastern part. I think there is more tension since they are off worse than the people in the West. Less jobs, etc.

were gray, gray shots of people wearing gray moving through depressing concrete urban areas under overcast skies.

It made Eastern Europe look like a giant parking garage. :shrug:

honestly. All the buildings in the cities and towns were gray. No color whatsoever. On some houses in Leipzig you could still see the holes from gunshots from WW2.

the people in the countryside must have had some color. :shrug:

so the overall impression was gray.

an example of a house after 40 years GDR:

I've spoken to people from Yugoslavia/Bosnia who say that life was better under communism, but most of the pictures that have made it to the west make Soviet communism (and Chinese communism, for that matter) seem pretty bad.

What do you think?

sure, you had a safe job. But that was it. You had no freedom. You lived in awful building (OK, not all looked as bad as the one in the pic I posted, but enough). Nobody cared for it, since it wasn't private property. And the State didn't care and of course there was barely material to repair. It is not only one thing, but all together that made it a depressing State to live in.

Yes, Germany got the best deal out of the destruction of the Communism. All the other States have to struggle more.

called "Global Awareness" (really globalization) and the professor had spent a few years travelling in the USSR and he made it out to be pretty grim. Just no incentives for hard work or ethics in the workplace. He said the joke was "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."

But talking to my Bosnian roommate and her boyfriend, they agreed that life was much better under communism. (But considering the civil war, how could they not? Also, moving to the US was very hard for them.) It seems like the former USSR is really having trouble with capitalism. I have a friend who went there for New Years and she said the streets are full of beautiful young women, but no young men, because they all come back from military service and drink themselves to death.

Germany seems to be doing very well, but some of the other countries, not so much.

Is there a difference in attitude between the west and the east?

with their war. But the tensions were there before. They just were surpressed. You know what I mean. People don't turn to racists within some years. They were it before already.

The problem in the former USSR is that the people never lived in a democracy. Till 1918 they had the Czar and then moved right into a Communist dictatorship. Where are they supposed to learn about democracy?

You are implying here that there needs to be a social understanding of democracy for a democratic movement to flourish. The Soviet Union did not make a successful transition to capitalism in part because there was no democratic tradition there as well.

So what does this bode for the middle east, specifically Iraq and Afghanistan??

very Western as far as I know. So I think there is an understanding of what it was like to be free. Even though they had the Shah.

Iraq. I don't know. I think in the Middle East countries the religion plays another role than in the European countries. And religion will play a big part in the politics. And the Western countires have to understand and accept that. I don't think the Western democracy will work in the Middle East. They have to find another form of democracy.

(and watch me get a tap on my phone for saying this) he hates us because we're not Muslim, out economy is based on lending money at interest, and we think we can create our own rules. He equates democracy with a rejection of Sharia (God's rules), and the creation of our own rules, and that is inherently abhorrent to him. Admittedly, he's WAAAAAY out there on the wacko fringe, but the "new" Afghan government has adopted Sharia law, and that seems to be the direction that a lot of Middle Eastern governments are leaning in. I don't know how that can be at all compatible with capitalism. Christianity itself has spent a long, long time adapting into modern capitalist forms. :shrug:

Though OTOH, there are many very westernized, capitalist Islamic countries, such as Malaysia.

It's such a mess... the intersection of faith, economics, and politics... :(

but you know that long enough in the European countries the same interaction took place. Just remember the time of the inquisition in Spain. It took Europe a long time to come to were it stands now.

I don't think that every country in the world has to have the same democracy or form of government as the West. It is wrong to try to pressure them into a corsett that isn't working for them. The Islamic countries were way earlier civilized than the European countries. Guess they did something right back then and the Islam didn't interfere with that.

Religious fanatism no matter which religion is wrong. And the Christians have the fanatism as well. Why can't different religions live peaceful next to each other. Why do there have to be wars over it. Why are people surpressed because of their religion? It is just plain wrong in my eyes.

I remember a picture in one describing a Soviet election. The election officials were all in uniform and glaring at the voters, and there was a big sign saying "VOTE YES" to illustrate the point that their elections were shams.

in East Germany as well.

Doesn't it remind you a bit of the last two election in the U.S.? :crazy:

And I know elections were shams under communism, but the way they illustrated it in that book — "VOTE YES" — seemed a bit propagandistic to me.

but as far as I remember from what my parents told me from elections in the GDR, there was no such thing as a ballot.

that they held an "election," took some ungodly percentage of the eligible voters and announced that's how many voted for the party favorite. I didn't think anyone ever actually voted. That's why I didn't understand the "VOTE YES" sign.

(When I was about 3 or 4, Khruschev passed through my hometown on the train, en route to San Francisco. A lot of people, my family and I included, went to watch the train go by. It was very strange, as if our sacred land had been fouled by evil or something.)

the only chance of not counting into the final vote was to void the vote.

:hi: :pals::loveya:

:D


:hi: :loveya: :hug: :pals:

Don't expect me to make a whole helluva lot of sense for the nest two weeks. My computer is locking up on DU spell checks. I haven't had to reboot yet but I have closed three unresponsive post and opened a new DU window x( starting my thoughts all over again. I can't even drag and drop!

Fulda was where World War III was supposed to start. :D

*puzzled look on face*

life as you knew it in the GDR. I'd read it!

I'm not a good writer though. And my life wasn't and isn't that exciting. I rather leave that to others.

:hug:

who fancies himself an aspiring author. The topics are in the responses of this thread--how the buildings looked, how the colors, or lack of colors, etc.

You're almost there!

:hug:

:blush:

I saved the thread in my Journal. Maybe I will come back to it.

White....

I blame that on a Voice of America Commercial that featured the Drifters singing On Broadway and some kids in an East European city listening....

Also, all the news at that time was Black and White...

Curious how that happens....

of course they tried to convinve us Communist countries - good, the others - bad

But we had TV from West Germany and saw it wasn't all bad and we knew it wasn't all good where we lived.

Is a strong thing....

Stronger than reality....

Yeah, tell me about it. I'm gonna be a father. If you knew me you'd realize how that is a :wtf: moment for me and my friends.

:hi: