Watching Myths Unwind

A few generations from now our descendants will wonder,

I want to step back from our gargantuan dilemmas of 2009 and reflect on the East German intelligentsia I interviewed in 1990-1992 at the time of the unification of Germany. Readers might find this recollection tangential, irrelevant or idiosyncratic; nonetheless, my rationale is this: these East Germans faced the destruction of their national myth, which held that socialism was the true victor over Nazism and that capitalism