Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germans who outlived their country are haunted by an odd reluctance to let go of the bad old days.

They even have a name for their odd nostalgia: "ostalgia."

"Ost" means east in German. They don't miss the hell that the Wall represented. They're delighted to be rid of the Soviet occupiers, the secret police, the shootings of demonstrators, the decades of shortages or the economic stagnation.

But by the time I paid my first visit to Berlin in 2003, I was surprised to see kiosks popping up like weeds from the popular Kurfurstendamm shopping area to the old "Checkpoint Charlie" guard post selling old military caps, red-star medals and other relics, fake and real, of the old socialist and ridiculously misnamed "German Democratic Republic" that we call East Germany.

There was even serious talk of a GDR theme park in Berlin, complete with surly border guards to rummage through your belongings. Whoopee.

Yet, far from the tourist haunts, former Easterners sought out what the fall of the Wall had quickly swept away: the toys, gadgets, awful-tasting cigarettes and other artifacts of the lives they used to know.

Particularly prized is the Trabant, the GDR's official box-shaped smoke-belching, two-cylinder sedan. Toy versions of the Cold War clunker are available everywhere, reminding many of their youths. So does the Ampelmaennchen, "little traffic light man." The elf-like figure that was the "walk/don't walk" signal at East German intersections is reborn in toys, T-shirts, coasters and refrigerator magnets.

Trendy Berliners have been known to throw "Ost parties," featuring Cold-War-era pop tunes, GDR flags, Commie youth garb and whatever East German beverages that managed to survive the transition to capitalism.

No, East Germans don't miss their oppressors, but many were not prepared to have their political, cultural and social ways so thoroughly overwhelmed and swept away by the West. They were not prepared to be told, as one Easterner told me with resentment, "that your life up until now counts for nothing. Absolutely nothing."

You can feel their pain in ironic "ostalgia" films like Wolfgang Becker's 2003 "Good Bye Lenin!," which have become a genre unto themselves. It tells the story of a mother who fell into a coma in the old GDR and didn't wake up until after it was gone. To avoid a shock that might kill her, her son goes to great lengths to fool her into thinking her beloved GDR is still around.

"The country my mother left behind was a country she believed in," says the narrator, "a country that never existed in that form; a country that, in my memory, I will always associate with my mother."

Film critic Roger Ebert enjoyed the movie but found it to be flawed in never addressing the self-deception that makes the mother so devoted to the regime in the first place. Good point, Roger, but I think this movie was made for an audience that knew precisely why the woman was devoted to the regime. She was devoted because the flawed world it created was like her family, too much a part of her to be taken away, even when she knew she was better off without it.

Maybe I am over-identifying, but as a black American old enough to remember legal racial segregation in the early 1960s, I understand the emotional losses that come as an unexpected price of freedom.

"Negro-stalgia" could describe the way my generation and our elders sometimes romanticize the black community's "unity" and self-sufficiency before the civil rights revolution knocked down the walls of Jim Crow segregation and redlining.

"Families stuck together," we recall. "The whole community looked out for one another and made sure that the kids behaved." We romanticize our oppression not only to relive the glories of our youth but also to own our history, memorialize our struggles and confirm that our lives, even at their worst, meant something.

Understanding German "ostalgia" gave me some insight, I believe, into the unexpected wariness I encountered among young Cubans a few years ago in Havana as they considered the prospect of life after the Castro brothers.

Eager as they may be to see an end to Raul and Fidel Castro's regime, many also worry about the loss of community, strong families and sharing, among other cultural shocks that inevitably follow if democracy and commercialism are thrust upon them too quickly. Who can blame them? They don't want to lose the good parts of the lives they live now, even as they yearn for the benefits of freedom.

========

E-mail Clarence Page at cpage(at)tribune.com, or write to him c/o Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, NY 14207.