It's still a bit of a heated subject here. I'm old enough to remember the wall coming down, but i grew up in the west, so i always only knew the western side of the story, which was full of horseshoe theory, vuvuzela no iphone (our equivalent is "DDR no banana", as imported fruit where often hard to get there) and resentment about the partition. Then when i got older, i met a ton of people from the east (both from the DDR and a bunch of other formerly AES countries) and the common theme was usually "yes, it was bad ... it was a dictatorship and i didn't want that system any longer, BUT ..." The east had it really rough after the reunification. It wasn't as harsh as in Russia, but 80% of the people there lost their jobs, entire industries got bought up for nothing by companies from the west, and while the stores were suddenly full of consumer goods that people had always yearned for, they had no money to buy them with. There's a lot of very deep resentment of capitalism among easterners and while there's historic reasons why nazis are a really serious problem there, it's also the part of the country where leftist politicians are still most successful. People there often don't buy into the narratives of liberal democracy, one way or the other. There's a lot of small differences like that. A historic case of one society being split in two and then both halves developing independently under totally different material conditions and a totally different ruling ideology.