sorry guy, you got ot wrong: from ’84 to about ’99 Berlin was the best place to be. Especially after 89 – until mid ninetees still the hope for the possibility to build some unique, non-comercial culture; so many new areas in your homet town to be discovered; contacts with people from countries you had hardly heard of before (all eastern block students seemed to come to the city); cheap flats almost everywhere (in east Berlin you could just break the doors of an abandoned flat, move in and write a declaration to the authorities that you live there and would pay the average rent for state owned flats – which was rediculously low at that time); lots of political projects to get something new going; etc. And for those of you who are rather into the parties of life: so many empty, abandoned houses that could be turned into squats, illegal clubs and bars, so many parties in areas where no private phones were installed so no-one could call the cops when it git a bit livelier, large parts of inner Berlin (Kreuzberg, Schöneberg in the west, Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg in the east)turned into a vast playground of those who were into music, partying, meeting people in a non-comercial, alternative way. The best time of my live. However, if you liked bigoted Spießerberlin of the early 60s, of course, the early 90s were anathema to you…

rows and rows of interlinked metal fences formed into cages .. into which the public is herded, and told if they want to get out they cannot get back in…

thousands of police standing around doing nothing except chatting up the babes and insulting any hippies that happen to walk by…

oh, and they are maning the checkpoints that the celibrities and friends of politicians go through to get to the good views of the event…

If you haven’t experienced the tourists at Checkpoint Charlie back in the day, you haven’t experienced the fake outrage. The Museum is still there. Today it is more of a right-wing propaganda house, sucking Ronald Reagan’s dick by way of propaganda. Before, it was about all the escape attempts. Now it has about half the escape attempts and the rest is propaganda. Everything the Americans ever did was good. Everything the Kommies did was bad. And, to please the right-wing hippies out there, there is a display of peaceful protests (as if merely being nonviolent ever achieved anything).
Back then, every wannabe Ayn Rand or Thomas Friedman could safely taunt the evil Kommie guards from behind the white line dividing East from West. Then go back to Buttfuck Minnesota and claim they fought Communism.
Me, I used to listen to Jugendradio der DDR to find out when the Kommie parades were being held so I could enjoy a great day out on Karl Marx Allee.
It was also nice to meet girls who were not lesbian feminazis, not prostitutes and not fucked up on drugs the way they all were in West Berlin.

I spent the evening with a wonderful and attractive journalist from a Nordic country watching events on television. She had some degree from a University of Leipzig so had spent considerable time in DDR. We spent the evening drinking champagne and engaging in other age-appropriate activities.

As the evening wore on, she began to mourn all the accomplishments of DDR that were now under threat including the probable loss of the arguably the world’s best kindergartens. She grew quite sad after a while. Finally she brightened visibly and said, “I am forgetting the biggest disaster of all–with the Berlin Wall down, where are American presidents going to go to give their hopelessly embarrassing speeches about democracy?”

More champagne was consumed.

Somehow, I was not the least surprised when Oestalgie broke out in the old Warsaw Pact nations. Anyone who has seen the sweet and very funny “Goodbye Lenin” knows exactly what I am talking about.

But what was so amazing to me was how much this blue-eyed Finn foresaw the night it was happening. I can think of no USA journalist who gets it so right 20 years later.