East Germany
Last time this far south in Germany, I was in Eisenach, about 4 hours north of Stuttgart. I was there on a press event together with a few other journalists from Scandinavia to see how beautifully reunited Germany had become 20 years after the wall and fences had come tumbling down.
If memory serves me correctly, Eisenach is famous for two things; an automotive museum located adjacent to what used to be a BMW factory but was renamed EMW (Eisenacher Motorenwerk) as Eisenach was part of East Germany – and Wartburg Castle where Martin Luther (of the Protestant persuasion) was kept under house arrest and also where he translated the bible from Latin to German.
Both Wartburg Castle and the factory were interesting places to visit. But the most memorable takeaway was during the press dinner when our guide, a woman in her 60s, admitted how much she missed East Germany’s patriarch, Erich Honecker, and how the state “took care” of everything for its citizens.
I’m going to paraphrase her here, but the gist of this remarkable, wine-fueled confession was this:
“You know, we never had to worry about anything…where to live, where to study, what kind of work we would do, the food we could buy…it was the same for everyone. Now it’s chaos…capitalist chaos…”