20 years united Germany

[Kulindahr]

^
A big part of that "good old days" connection for many people, according to the father of a friend in Germany, is that many who grew up under the old system have never gotten accustomed to making decisions for themselves. He had workers he was committed to who dragged down his business because they couldn't adjust to not having everything set out for them. Fortunately for the nature of his business, he had some things that had to be done in time-honored fashion, the same way over and over, so he moved that entire part of the operations to the former East.

Jens wrote a while back that he's now beginning to encounter the opposite problem: it's becoming more difficult to find workers, as the older ones retire, willing to do the same thing over and over....

 

[TongueTied]

Despite a lot of economic problems in the east, Germany has done an amazing job since re-unification.

I was in Germany a couple of months after the Berlin Wall fell, and took the train from Fulda, West Germany to Eisenach, East Germany. It was night and day. The last western town the train stopped at looked like the stereotypical small German town: tidy, prosperous, picturesque, even the old buildings were well maintained. The minute the train crossed the border and stopped in the first eastern town, it literally looked like something from World War II: dilapidated, peeling paint everwyhere, dingy, grey, very few shops or commercial establishments. I half expected to run into Col. Klink.