[nosianu]

> What you call "small" advantages: car, pool, VCRs, bananas - put them so far about their average citizen that it was like having a private jet and yacht today.

At this point at the very latest, if not your first sentence already it is clear that you are nothing but a troll.

But tell someone who actually lived there, me, your nonsense - sure.

> and they didn't give up their power willingly.

They did. I lived there in 1989. Nothing happened. They could have given the order to fire, the troops were listening and obeying. They never did. You tell lies. What a twisted, biased, one-sided world view, on a site that's supposed to have open-minded discussions. Truly disgusting, and I say that especially because this was my live, right then, right there, and you do speak nonsense, which sounds not less ideologically blinded than the worst I heard in the GDR, sometimes personally (to me, a teacher, 1989: "Sie schwimmen im Fahrwasser des Klassenfeinds!").

[nickpp]

I too was alive in those times and I remember them very well. I remember a doctor visit meant a pack of Kent or a bag of coffee beans. How a kind's school year meant a deodorizer or some soap for the teacher. How a promotion or advancement meant joining the Party or ratting on your coworkers to the Secret Police.

Just in a different EE country, not in GDR - I must specify. Here we were starving. And they did gave the order to fire - the troops obeyed.

I must also admit that we are extremely skeptical of anything coming out of the ex-GDR around here. We know it was thoroughly infiltrated by the KGB and Stasi controlled everything in the country. We also watched Merkel making the whole Germany dependent on Russian energy, practically delivering it in Putin's hands - who was in KGB in GDR...