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MANY east Germans are craving a return to what they remember as a cosy "good life" in their half of the reunited country when it was still a Communist state. The wave of nostalgia is sweeping such diverse aspects of the nation's life as literature, partygoing, films, voting preferences and even shopping habits in the five new eastern German states as next month's anniversary of the Wall's fall approaches.
The trend is supported by an opinion poll published this month which shows that 20 per cent of east Germans would like to see the Berlin Wall still standing - a sign that disillusionment with German unification remains rife more than nine years after it came about.
Ralf Hirsch, the former East German dissident and human rights activist said: "There is widespread frustration about unification in the east. Many still see it as a form of Western colonisation. They look to the past with a nostalgic longing. Yet it is only the pleasant memories that remain."
The most vivid example of the Ostalgie phenomenon is the prevalence of parties in east Berlin where guests dress in Communist Youth Movement and People's Army uniforms while waving East German flags.
Many east Germans now buy in shops stocking exclusively east German products while others flock to see films released to coincide with this month's 50th anniversary of the founding of East Germany. They provide a nostalgic, if satirical, view of life under communism.
The nostalgia can even be detected in the nation's current political make-up. Last week the heirs to the former East German Communist Party, the Party for Democratic Socialism (PDS), made sweeping gains in Berlin's city government elections, capturing more than 40 per cent of the vote in the eastern half of the city.
East Berlin shopkeepers such as Elke Mats are part of the trend. A year ago she opened Intershop 2000, which takes its name from the Communist-era East German hard-currency shops and sells only products made in the east.
Today, the rundown building near east Berlin's main railway station does a brisk trade in products such as "Club-cola" and "Karo" cigarettes - East German brands that have been resuscitated with injections of west German money in response to popular demand.
Mrs Mats said: "My customers have tried all the Western products that flooded the market after the Wall came down and they are fed up with them. They are glad to get their old brands back." Cinemagoers are queueing to see Sonnenallee, a story about growing up in Seventies East Germany, which challenges the Western view of life under communism as unmitigated drudgery and repression.
The film, by the east German director Leander Haussmann, sold more than 130,000 tickets in the first three days after it went on general release and now looks set to be the most successful German production in five years. Sonnenallee, which will appear in English as Eastie Boys, is a fictional tale about five teenagers growing up in the shadow of the Wall.
It depicts them as being more interested in sex, rock music and hallucinogenic drugs than escaping communism. Haussmann, in defence of his film, which is largely autobiographical, said: "I spent the best years of my life in East Germany." His work is to be followed next month by another film satirising the East called Heroes Like Us, which depicts the former East German leader Erich Honecker as being alive and well and sipping cocktails on a beach in Cuba.
Literature has not escaped Ostalgie fever. The Wall Stands on the Rhine, a novel by the west German Christian von Ditfurth, takes the process a stage further by describing an imaginary reunited Germany in which the communists have taken over the West. It has leading German car manufacturers turned into state-owned collectives, Helmut Kohl living in exile in Switzerland and the Volkswagen Polo renamed the Baikal, after the Siberian lake.
While Germany's political establishment dismisses Ostalgie as harmless fun, it is alarmed by its political consequences. Before last week's Berlin success, the PDS had last month pushed Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's ruling Social Democrats into third place in elections in two of Germany's eastern states. The party now looks certain to remain a permanent part of the political framework.
This is because the PDS is entirely home-grown. Die Zeit newspaper said: "The PDS provides a kind of national asylum for east Germans and it is apparently the only political institution in Germany capable of doing so." Commentators predict that German politics will soon be dominated by the conservative Christian Democrats, Mr Schöder's Social Democrats and the PDS.