Kati Witt, the pirouetting ice-skating star of the defunct East German state, caused a stir the other day by appearing in public in a tightly stretched T-shirt that announced: “I Love the German Democratic Republic.” The uproar was prompted not by offended sensibilities — remember the GDR, the watch towers, the cold dead hand of the secret police? — but by a sense of approval; a taboo had been broken.

Many east Germans want to be East Germans again: they want to be swaddled by a kind of soft communism. Should we be worried? I think so. Not because the Berlin Wall is about to be rebuilt but because reunification has so manifestly failed to convince millions of east Germans that capitalism and liberal democracy are superior to the ramshackle socialism of the Cold War.

The Kati Witt phenomenon — she is about to front a prime-time TV series on the highlights of East German life — is part of a wave of Ostalgie, a yearning for the East. As such it is harmless enough, even comic. The latest Ostalgic excursion is to appear in British cinemas from Thursday — Goodbye Lenin, the funniest film to come out of Germany for a century or so. The storyline is clever, sometimes touching. A devoutly socialist mother suffers a heart attack, falls into a coma and is unconscious when East Germany collapses. Some months later she wakes up and is in acute danger of a second heart attack if she is subjected to shock. So the son reconstructs the East German State in and around her convalescent bedroom: faked news footage is piped into her television set, she is sheltered from Coca Cola, visitors dress with studied shabbiness and the boy goes to extravagant lengths to supply her with socialist-era pickled gherkins. I watched this film with a west and an east German; they laughed in different places.

The point of the film, and the surrounding Ostalgic fuss, is that communism produced an imperfect world, full of defeat, yet it was not evil or run by monsters. It was intimately bound up with the biographies of people who believed in something better. The latest Stasi files to be released into the public domain are shocking not because people snitched on their friends for money — where would the publishing industry be without that kind of help? — but because so many did so for free. They were convinced that their Germany was the superior one; it did not dump on the weak, throw people out of work, it was modest and, usually, decent. That sentimental attachment to a dead state lingers on and I’m not sure it is as ludicrous as it sounds.

We have failed the East Germans. We promised them prosperity, a flourishing new culture that would lift them out of provincial mediocrity. Instead they have become the Mezzogiorno of the north, a hopeless bog where subsidies sink swiftly, leaving mere bubbles on the surface. The united Germany became the laggard of Europe not just because of a chronic inability to reform but also because of the fundamental mistakes made in the east during the 1990s.

If you drive the few miles from Mecklenburg in the east to Hamburg, you leave a state where the average income per head is 16,890 euros a year and enter a city state with an average income of 43,550 euros: the gap between rich west and poor east in some ways more stark than 13 years ago. The east is beginning to resemble a 19th-century colonial settlement: a few scattered, relatively prosperous, oases surrounded by depopulated wasteland.

Airports are built on the basis of half-baked projections about tourism. In villages the houses facing the road are brightly painted; behind, there is a broken-down community, unfinished buildings, dumped cars and unsaleable farmland. A million people have moved out of eastern Germany since unification. At night teenagers, bored and drunk, play chicken on the long straight country roads with hot-rodded cars. On the morning of Berlin’s overmarketed Love Parade, I was marooned at a small station in Brandenburg. Waiting for the train to the German capital was a boy in a wheelchair — the victim of a dare that involved jumping off a local bridge — and three halfnaked youths smoking marijuana. One almost fell in front of the train, another vomited. It was 10 o’clock in the morning in the heart of what used to be Prussia.

The ideologically coherent argument is that this generation has been messed up not by capitalism but because of the soul-destroying legacy of communism. But these teenagers were five years old when the wall tumbled. Communist rule in East Germany did not have much to do with Marxism but it offered a sheltered and slower life. Now these lost tribes feel exposed, under pressure to succeed in a society they no longer understand. So they reach back to a mythical pre-1989 world, not because they crave communism and the Stasi and the ban on foreign travel, but because it was a gentler age.

East Germans learnt patience: they had to wait 15 years for cars that could barely move faster than lawnmowers. They valued the extended family: it was almost impossible to live independently before middle age. East Germans developed a fetishistic interest in Western goods but most understood that consumer choice was nowhere near as important as ethical choice, the daily tests of loyalty and self-respect in a crumbling police state. These were values learnt under communism and in spite of it; it has made thoughtful individuals out of east Germans, sceptical of ideologies, of populism and posturing. Perhaps we should stop mocking them and listen more carefully to the people that history left behind.

The author is Berlin correspondent of The Times

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