The Cold War as ancient history - International Herald Tribune

Link: Cohen: The Cold War as ancient history - International Herald Tribune.

BERLIN: It's now 18 years, a generation, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, so I thought I'd ask some post-wall German high school kids about communism. The subject seemed about as riveting and relevant to them as, say, the Holy Roman Empire.

"Communism? What's that?" said Ricardo Westendorf, 17, a student at the Carl-von-Linné school in what was East Berlin. "I think we talked about it in a history lesson, but I was ill."

(((And check out the historical melancholy of these former East German dissidents.)))

"Krupa, their teacher, said life was better since 1989, but still she was disappointed, because "what we were fighting for was not a united Germany, but to make socialism better, and so this is not what I wanted, although I have grown used to it."

A similar sentiment was memorably expressed by Joachim Gauck, a former protest leader in East Germany, when he declared: "We dreamed of paradise and woke up in North-Rhine Westphalia."

(((Oh to be young and in North-Rhine Westphalia.)))