Saturday, September 03, 2005

"Sixteen years after the fall of the Berlin wall, Ellen Müller looks back with nostalgia at her life in the then communist East Germany. "I didn't have to worry whether we had enough to eat," she says. "Brötchen [bread rolls] cost five pfennigs. People cared more about children. And if you were ill you didn't have to wait to see a doctor. It was all free."Far from enjoying the "blooming landscapes" promised by the then chancellor, Helmut Kohl, when the wall fell, Mrs Müller is one of a growing band of east Germans who are fed up with capitalism."