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“There was a long row of cars in
the middle of the night,” Susan
Penquitt remembers vividly,
despite being just 8 years old
when her family drove across
the border into West Germany
for the first time. The road led to
the city of Fulda in Hesse, about
65 miles east of Frankfurt, and
the toy section of a department
store, a sight the little girl had
barely dreamed of. “When I saw
the Barbie on the shelf, you know,
that was it. I don’t remember any
other toy in that shop.”Lovingly
looked after for three decades,
the iconic American doll today
belongs to Penquitt’s eldest
daughter Nora, 8, in their home
outside of Leipzig. It’s a happy
token of what was not always
a happy time. Like millions of
East Germans working in largely
state-owned industries, both of
Penquitt’s parents lost their jobs
following reunification. “They
never had so many sorrows,
really,” she says.
surcharge, a fee on income, capital gains and corporate taxes
currently set at 5.5%, in order to help the former communist
east. Yet despite receiving €243 billion in “Soli” taxes since
1995, the economy in the country’s East continues to lag far
behind the West’s. Unemployment is higher, wages are lower,
and the population of the former G.D.R.’s territory has dropped
to its lowest level in 114 years. It has given rise among some to
what is known as “Ostalgia,” a longing for the simplicity and
cradle-to-grave comforts of life in the G.D.R. Political disaffec-
tion has seen parts of the former East become a heartland for
populist parties; in the eastern state of Thuringia on Oct. 27,
the far-right anti migrant Alternative for Germany party fin-
ished ahead of Merkel’s center-right party in local elections.
What East Germans decided to buy when the Wall fell says
a lot about that moment in our history, 30 years ago—about
the true value of money, about competing economic systems,
and about the hopes, freedoms and tensions of reunifying a
country. Each purchase tells its own story. Here are 10 of them:
THE ALL-AMERICAN DOLL
Penquitt and her
daughter Nora play
with the Barbie she
bought in 1989
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