After the fall of the GDR, we, my 18- and 19-year-old friends and I, had the fearful idea that thousands of young people steeped in dictatorship would now compete with us, the effeminate Westerners, on the job market.
We didn’t realize how much capitalist materialism had already steeled us and that we were actually the hard survivors of a merciless system, who had been born with a sense of purpose and the ability to move forward at any cost. And we still thought of ourselves as standing rather beside the system….