24 years ago today---maybe it seems like no big deal now, but back then? The earth moved.

[DFW]

50. Germany was a special kind of situation that history has rarely duplicated

When the "DDR" was set up, the Soviets used to refer to them as "our Germans," which did not exactly inspire solidarity except with the privileged party bosses and their families, who were perfectly content to be "their Germans" as long as they kept their perks.

On the other hand, many in the West found the people in the East to have developed such a different mentality that they would have preferred that East German remain a different country. The whole sudden change caught many people flat-footed, and they didn't know how to cope with it.

I remember a friend who had been at a hotel on the North Sea coast where a family of East Germans asked, upon checking in, "what time is breakfast?" They were told between 7AM and 10 AM. They said, "yes, of course, but when is OUR breakfast?" The confused hotel worker repeated "between 7 and 10." Exasperated, the East Germans asked again, "yes, we get that, but when are we, specifically, supposed to have breakfast?" Equally exasperated, the western Hotel receptionist repeated, "any time you want between 7 and 10!" In East Germany, hotels assigned you a specific hour when you were to have breakfast: "you will be at 7, and you will be at 8," and so on. The concept of being able to choose to have breakfast whenever the hell they felt like it was a totally foreign idea to the East Germans, whose control-freak society didn't allow for hotel guests to make such decisions on their own.