Kapital 11 Kultur, Yuntao Chen

For this week's Kultur, I read through several interesting articles. The first one was the Wikipedia page of "Ostalgie", which refers to nostalgia for East Germany. I found this very interesting, because this also happens in my country, China. Nowadays the old communism era is fading away from people's lives, but certain parts of it is gradually finding its way back to the pop culture. You can easily get souvenirs, T-shirts, and mugs that commemorate the old time. I think this has more to do with the mysterious nature of fashion than with people actually longing for the past.

I then read an article about the differences between Southern and Northern Germany. Since Germany does not cover a very large land mass, I was not expecting such a huge difference in terms of customs and languages between to two parts of Germany. I heard from my German friends before about the south-north division in Germany. This article just confirmed these "rumors". It was funny that some people would joke about these differences -- "had the allied power decided to divide Germany North-South, the Berlin wall would probably still stand today."

The last article I read was about the influences of the reunification on today's German society. The article talked about the differences in mentality of people from the east and west. I was very surprised to know that even today such differences are till present, and today the states in west Germany are still paying a large sum to the states in the east. However, I think the benefits of a unified Germany probably still largely outweigh these drawbacks. After all, the German National football team now has one less opponent in the FIFA world cup!