There are people, believe it or not, who think that communist East Germany wasn’t really so bad. After all, the argument runs, people sat around talking about books, music, and the meaning of life because there was no dumbed-down mass culture.There was a warm communal spirit, and the state provided cradle to grave welfare, free child care, cheap housing, and so on. So it’s not surprising that there are all these elegiac German films and novels now appearing that draw on the prevalent Ostalgie (one of those untranslatable German compound nouns that combines “East” and “nostalgia”).