Another of Tocqueville’s possibilities, that is, that sometimes it’s the “laws” that shape the “mores.” For never did laws/regime/ideology degrade mores more than in the communist countries. Kopplekamm’s stunning slide show of East Berlin buildings before-and-after the fall of GDR give you striking visual evidence of this—for the more human side see of course The Lives of Others . But the ability of Germans to so quickly recover themselves, at least in the externals of buildings, also suggests the durability of Culture.
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