Photo Gallery Searching for Eastern Germany
What is eastern Germany? More that two decades after reunification, that question has become surprisingly difficult to answer. The eastern German identity has almost disappeared entirely.
A woman in the town of Lübbenau in Brandenburg. These days, local economies in former East Germany are more comparable with other regions in the west than with the rest of eastern Germany.
Eastern Germans are still far more likely than others to strip down at the beach, a remnant of the communist country's "FKK" culture. But other aspects of East German life are becoming much more difficult to identify.
Even the archives of the East German secret police, the Stasi, are soon to be folded together with the federal archives. It is no longer common for the Stasi files of German politicians and public figures to be checked for stains.
Former Brandenburg Governor Manfred Stolpe, and his counterpart from Saxony Kurt Biedenkopf, doubled as representatives of the east. Now, the conference of eastern governors is largely meaningless.
The flag of East Germany. Nostalgia for the communist state has almost completely evaporated.
In the campaign, Chancellor Angela Merkel's East German roots have been held up as an explanation for her dispassionate approach to Europe. She, however, has embraced her past. Here, she is in 1990 at a meeting of East and West German finance ministers in her role as deputy spokesperson of the East German government.
