>>>> VFP will be hopelessly left behind looking like an East German housing project circa 1960
>>>
>>>Strangely enough those houses have been massively bought by US investment companies during the past decade. ;)
>>
>>I bet!
>>
>>I assume you've seen the great German movie Goodbye Lenin, where the grown East German children of their old socialist mother tried to pretend and make it look like the wall hadn't come down during her hospital stay (so as to avoid causing anxiety and possibly another heart attack.) One of the toughest tasks for the kids was to explain to their mother why was there was a huge Coca Cola banner being rolled down the face of another tall building across the street. The answer: the original Coca Cola recipe was actually an East German patent, and now East Germany had taken it back! Another question: Why are there all these BMW's and Mercedes driving around the streets all of a sudden? The answer: For humanitarian reasons, the East German Communist Party chief Hoenecker had opened the border so that the suffering people of the capitalist West Germany could come and enjoy the socialist paradise in the East! As time went on, it was harder and harder for the children to find "comfortable" East German foods etc. for their mother, because these items were quickly being replaced by products from other EU countries.
>>
>>This was one of the funniest and oddly also one of the most touching movies I've seen in a long time. It was not as black and white as I would have thought when I started watching it -- as it turned out, the West was no paradise, either.
>
>Hi Pertii,
>
>I like the movie too. I like to show you one example for jokes on would only know if one have lived in the German Democratic Republic. On his last day on the company the boy turns the light switch. "Der letzte dreht das Licht aus" - "The last one turns the light off" was a proverb. It was created to save energy. But it was understand as someday the last citizen will be gone.
>
>Agnes

That's a funny one.

A more serious and another excellent movie about the topic of East Germany, of course, is "Other People's Lives" It is nice to see that the German movie industry is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. Good stuff...