Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Reunification Day

299 words

Public holiday today because it’s the anniversary of reunification. And the sun was shining.

The odd thing is that while hardly anybody will deny that reunification has been a good thing in principle, most people don’t see this as a big deal these days. And many are discontent with the situation that resulted from it. Both in the western parts of Germany where people see their money vanishing to support the eastern parts and in the eastern parts of Germany where people got the impression that they’ll be off as well as people used to be in West Germany (cf Mr Kohl’s blühende Landschaften).

But in general that never happened. Rather, whatever ‘industry’ they had in East Germany was dismantled and many people ended up not having places to work and possibly not having learned to deal with the beast that is capitalism. Hence, in many places, loads of people are out of work, not well off, and even some nasty right wing parties manage to grow on that frustration.

As a consequence many people just shrug when reunification comes up and glorify the times that existed before. Even the consequences from all this: Germany not being right at the east-most end of the western world now but rather in the middle of Europe (and the EU) with loads of new stuff starting come from the east aren’t seen as exciting but with a load of fear.

Exciting may be an interesting word here as somehow the late 1980s with the revolutions in central/eastern Europe were probably the most exciting times many of us witnessed politically or even historically. Things actually changed. For better. With news usually being bad or at least inane, that was cool for a change.

Anyway, I made a cake for the occasion…

Marble cake

October 3, 2008, 20:29

Tagged as cake, germany, marble cake.

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