BERLIN – On Nov. 9, Berlin will throw a blowout Festival of Freedom to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But don't let the fireworks over the Brandenburg Gate fool you: The reunion of East and West Germany is still a work in progress.

There's a growing sense among East Germans that things weren't that bad in the not-so-democratic German Democratic Republic. A poll conducted this summer by the EMNID polling group revealed that 57 percent of East Germans believe the GDR had "more good than bad sides."

The Germans call this phenomenon Ostalgie – a combination of Ost, for East, and Nostalgie, for nostalgia.

A quick historical primer: The GDR was the communist dictatorship that held East Germany hostage from 1949 until 1989. Life was so good there that 3.5 million East Germans had fled by 1961, prompting the regime to seal off the border with the west, hence the Berlin Wall.

They shot people who tried to leave. Axel Klausmeier, director of the Berlin Wall Foundation, once showed me the East German border guard manual, which instructed that those attempting to flee should be "exterminated."

How can folks be nostalgic for such a dictatorship?

"Nobody really wants to have the GDR again. People remember a GDR that never existed," explained Robert Grünbaum of the Foundation for the Reconciliation of the Communist Dictatorship in East Germany.

The problem is one of perception.

"Young people increasingly see the GDR as positive because they don't know how it really was," said Klaus Schröder, a political scientist at the Free University of Berlin.

Journalist Johann Michael Möller compared East Germany to the post-Civil War South. Long after the Confederacy's defeat, some Southerners still romanticize the antebellum South.

"Even I had tears in my eyes when I saw Gone With the Wind," said Möller, radio director of Central German Broadcasting.

But let's face it – very few Southerners lived a Tara lifestyle. And the film doesn't show the brutal reality of slavery. Likewise, there's a tendency in East Germany to gloss over life under the dictatorship.

Instead of focusing on the Wall, lack of freedom and the secret police, East Germans complain that they lost job security and a sense of community.

Möller, who was the last GDR correspondent for the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, said, "The East German regime managed to forge a link between people's personal identity and the system."

That makes East Germans defensive. "An attack on the dictatorship is seen as an attack on them personally," he explained.

You don't find that kind of thinking in other former east-bloc countries such as Poland.

"Poland and the Czech Republic didn't have a rich older brother," Möller said, adding that wealth was "given" to East Germany.

Roughly $2.5 trillion has been pumped into East Germany since 1990, much of it coming from West Germany. That money built autobahns, rebuilt decaying cities and raised the standard of living in the East.

But talk to East Germans, and you'll hear frustration about the "arrogant" West Germans. Easterners often say they feel like second-class citizens.

Just like Southerners complained about Yankee carpetbaggers, some Eastern Germans are bitter about their Western brethren who steamrolled into the East after reunification, hoping to make a quick buck.

Unemployment remains high in East Germany (double what it is in the West), and Easterners are still generally poorer than West Germans, leading to frustration.

"Many people in the East watched shows like Dallas. In Dallas, they lived in beautiful homes, the sky was blue, and they made a lot of money. That was seen as a reflection of the West," said Peter Rollberg, a professor at The George Washington University.

"They expected their lives to be like that," said Rollberg, who grew up in East Germany and participated in the 1989 revolution that overthrew the GDR.

But after living in a dictatorship, some East Germans weren't wired to take charge and pursue their dreams.

"What's difficult is that people need to learn to manage their own lives. East Germans don't like to see that they are responsible for themselves," Rollberg told me.

Despite ongoing challenges, the East is more prosperous today than it was under communism. And more than 80 percent of all Germans say the fall of the Wall was positive, according to the same EMNID poll that revealed widespread homesickness for the GDR.

It just takes awhile to adjust to life in a free society.

"What many East Germans don't want to see is that the price of freedom is a certain degree of insecurity," said Rollberg.

Americans don't always want to accept that, either. Amid today's economic uncertainty, let's remember that while democratic capitalism may not be perfect, it sure beats the alternative.

Deep down, East Germans know that, too.

Clayton M. McCleskey is a Points staff writer based in Germany, where he is a Fulbright journalism scholar. His e-mail address is cmccleskey@dallasnews.com.