Thirty years ago, when it seemed that communism had finally lost and that capitalism had won, the irony of the bizarre second-hand car sale negotiation that I observed on the roadside near the border of West Germany and Czechoslovakia order was truly surreal. It was the last hours before the Berlin Wall started coming down, and on this road where I was standing, thousands of East German families in their cars were fleeing through an open Czech border-post into West Germany.  The cars were packed with parents, children, bedclothes, pots and pans, food, bottles, dogs and cats and anything else…

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