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Germany: Still divided after 18 years

An interesting survey undertaken by The Spiegel on the state of Germany 18 years after the ubiquitous Berlin Wall came down:

"To mark the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, SPIEGEL polled over 1,000 Germans who had grown up on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The disturbing conclusion is that, 18 years after the Wall came down, Germany remains as divided as ever.

Tourists walk past the East Side Gallery, one of the few remaining stretches of the Berlin Wall. The caption on the picture reads "There are many walls which need to be broken down."

Friday marks the 18th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It also marks the day on which children born on Nov. 9, 1989 will become legal adults -- the first generation to have grown up in the country following the collapse of communist East Germany and its reunification with West Germany.
Together with pollster TNS Forschung, SPIEGEL recently conducted a poll of two generations of eastern and western Germans in order to provide a progress report on the extent to which unification has taken place within the national psyche. Does the proverbial Wall still stand in Germans' heads nearly two decades after reunification?

Poll respondents included 500 people from the 14-24 age group. When the Wall fell, the oldest people in this group were just six years old -- too young to get any serious notion of what life was like in a country divided by the Cold War.

In addition, SPIEGEL polled 500 representatives of the generation that were the parents of the post-reunification youth. This enabled SPIEGEL to determine differences between the younger and older generations and their thinking about reunification. The results show that, even 18 years after the fall of the Wall, there is still no such thing as a truly unified Germany."

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