Description
Looks at life, after the wall, eastern Germany and the ashes of the past. Journalist Simon Burnett breathes life into the East German people, into their politics, and into the events that brought them to their present situation. German unification was expected to be a triumph of the human spirit, of political resourcefulness and of economic power. Instead, the process that began in late 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down has turned into an unending chronicle of division rather than unification and of economic bust rather than boom – a story of lost opportunities, of misjudgements, of human alienation, misspent money, cultural arrogance and unfulfilled promises. “Ghost Strasse” examines the persisting division between Eastern and Western Germany and explains why East Germans resent the West. It documents the phenomenal political revival of the so-called “post-communists” and the emergence of a virulent form of neo-Nazism in the East. And it deals with the tragedy of unification’s forgotten people: former East German political prisoners, many in ill health as a result of their brutal confinement and, bizarrely, treated with disdain by doctors.
