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The Boston Globe:
The Berlin Wall's great human experiment

12 October 2014

When the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, it created what London School of Economics associate professor Daniel Sturm calls a ''perfect experiment''. While people in West Germany voted in free elections, read independent newspapers, and protested if they felt dissatisfied with their government, their Eastern counterparts lived inside a surveillance state ruled by a zealously doctrinaire communist party. Where ''Ossis'' - an unofficial term for those who lived in East Germany - drove famously shoddy Trabant cars, wore drab clothing, and drank off-brand soda, their ''Wessi'' counterparts enjoyed Pepsi and regularly saw BMWs in the street. The two halves of the country were like a pair of identical twins separated at birth and raised by two very different sets of parents.

This article was published by The Boston Globe (U.S.A.) on October 12, 2014
Link to article here

Related links
Daniel Sturm webpage
Globalisation Programme webpage
Daniel Sturm CEP publications webpage

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