[Jim727]

Yes, everything is changing. The joke is that the official bird of Berlin is the Crane (as in construction crane).

The Ossi/Wessi (Ossi = East German; Wessi = West German) divide is very complex and, in some ways, greater than when the physical wall was there. The East Germans to some degree look at their years behind the wall as imprisonment and they deserve to be made whole. The West Germans to some degree have the attitude that they worked for everything they have so the Ossis can do the same.

One problem is very similar to our experience after WWII; rebuilding the devastated West German economy gave them much more state-of-the-art infrastructure than what we had. Same thing is happening to the East - and is being done with West German money. Also, the East Mark was exchanged 1:1 for the West Mark. As I recall, the fair market rate was really 16:1. I remember having tea with an East German who held his new money and very emotionally expressed disbelief that he was holding something that actually had value. That exchange resulted in inflation which, for the Germans, is very unwelcome given the memories of the 1930s.

The other, rather tragic, problem that divides East/West is that the East was so far behind in their education and business practices that the West German gov't made the decision that people over (I think it was 50) didn't have enough working life left in them to be worth the investment in retraining. This has built a whole generation of throw-aways. Imagine the problems.

Things are decidedly better, and aside from the massive amounts of graffiti that Berlin is now experiencing, the divide is difficult for an outsider to discern. It is, however, there. It will take time for the divide to disappear.