Thank you for this wonderful piece. I studied German in school and uni, and a few of my teachers grew up in the DDR.

Movies like "Sonnenallee" and "Goodbye Lenin!" informed a lot of what I imagined coming of age in East Germany would have been like! On a less light-hearted note, we also studied the repressive tyranny of living under constant Stasi surveillance.

I think you have hit the nail on the head when you write "People sensed the difference between ideal and reality and craved self-fulfillment. "