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You are here: Home Leisure Arts & Culture Celebrating communist kitsch

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29/07/2003Celebrating communist kitsch

The former East German parliament is
scheduled to be demolished
Anyone hankering after bad food, off-hand restaurant service and surly border guards along with the chance to sit in a communist kitsch designed living room could soon have their wishes fulfilled. More than 13 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a German company has decided to capitalise on the region's yearning for its communist past by creating an East German theme park. Nostalgia is a sure sign of economic stress. In Germany's former communist east so-called 'Ostalgie' (blending nostalgia with the German word for east) has been on the rise for years as unemployment has grown and the economy has stalled. One in five east Germans are without work, with the unemployment rate in the east soaring during the cold winter months to stand at 19.9 percent — almost double the rate in Germany’s west. In some small towns in the economically hard-press eastern part of the nation, unemployment is much higher with companies that shut down after the fall of communism have never been replaced, consequently leaving most of the town’s workforce living off welfare. It is also a far cry from the “blooming landscapes” that former Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised the east in the days following the implosion of communism. This is despite the vast millions of public funds that have been thrown at the east with economists worried that large sections of the region could turn into a sort of German mezzogiorno. Relations between the eastern and western parts of the nation have never been good with signs now emerging that many in the more prosperous part of the nation in the west are no longer prepared to address the problems of the east. The theme park “We don’t want to poke fun at what it used to be like – we want to provide a truly historical experience,” said Susanne Reich, spokeswoman for Massine Productions GmbH, the company which is planning the theme park.
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