ABSTRACT
The mass media in Germany greeted the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in the autumn of 1999 with a wave of reports about the state of the relationship between East and West Germans. This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book gives an account of how the alienation between Easterners and Westerners has come about in the first place. The empirical basis for this part is ethnographic fieldwork that has been undertaken in the state police departments of Brandenburg and Berlin between 1994 and 1996. The book discusses why the alienation seems to persist, mostly by reference to the controversy over the future of the Palace of the Republic, East Berlin's former parliament cum sociocultural center. It presents a couple of suggestions for how the alienation between Easterners and Westerners could be eased.
