Kulture 11 - Ryen

Diese Artikel haben mich überrascht. Ich hätte nie gedacht, dass jemand die Berliner Mauer zu aufbauen wollen würdet. [These articles surprised me. I would never have thought that anyone would want to rebuild the Berlin Wall.] I'm not sure if this is a grammatically correct German statement.

I had not known much about the fall of the Berlin wall before German 102. I had just assumed that the event was universally praised, and that Germany lived happily ever after. I was very surprised to read that "a quarter of West Germans wished the Berlin wall could be rebuilt", and that there is a phenomenon called "Ostalgie", nostalgia for communist East Berlin. What for? Was it really not so bad? But it seems that for most people, it was that bad. According to the timeline, and to many other things I've read, many people were very desperate to get out of East Berlin, and either died or were arrested trying to escape. It's interesting to see that even after the fall of the wall, the divide between East and West Germany still persists - the "Mauer im Kopf." When I think about it, it strikes me that the fall of the berlin wall was incredibly recent - only about 23 years ago, which is apparently not enough type for complete reintegration of divided Germany.

The article about the northerners and southerners in Deutschland made me think of the north/south stereotypes that exist even today in the United States. I'm told that the southern U.S. is in many places very different in culture than the north. I haven't witnessed much of this myself, because I've only been to big cities in the south, not the small towns where the differences are more apparent. But it's nice, or perhaps depressing, to know that the rest of the world has the problems we do.