Kultur 11

I'm not sure I should be as surprised as I am about the content of these articles, but nonetheless they startled me. Because Germany has one of the world's best economies and a few cities that are consistently ranked among the happiest in the world, it had never occurred to me that so many German citizens were unhappy with the reunification and would prefer the separation of East Germany and West Germany. I had figured that, by now, German citizens had adjusted to the reunification. However, the article entitled "Breaking Down the Wall in the Head" was written in 2004, so the social division between the east and west could have changed for the better since then (or for the worse).

The article about the real division of Germany being between the north and the south sounds very similar to the United States. We northerners, like northerners in Germany, think of southerners as unintelligent, reckless, racist rural-dwelling hicks, while they think of us as elitist liberals who live in big cities where it is always cold. I can definitely relate to the social division between the north and south in Germany. If the division is very similar to that in the US, though, there is not much harm in it.