Several of the shops mentioned in the article are in Kreuzberg which was in the west before the wall came down but now has more in common with other eastern districts like Friererichshain or Neukolln than ones like Charlottenburg in the west. These kind of quirky workshop shops or independent shops are more common in those eastern districts I think than in the west now, which has more of the usual sorts of big high street chains.
>Your comment feels more like vitriol than fact statement, regardless of being correct.
It's just about the shortest, blandest way to make that statement. That it's borderline "vitriol" or considered offensive to say X did Y when that is fact (or as close to fact as you can get with a subjective matter like this, nobody is going to say that communism was good for Eastern Europe) says something about culture here in 2019.
> That it's borderline "vitriol" or considered offensive says something about culture here in 2019.
I'm literally writing this comment from mobile while standing in a crowd near anti-communist protest in Prague. I can't really wrap my mind around this culture change.
People are very tired of the mildest bit of social democrat market intervention being denounced as "communism". Like "Nazi" it's a word that has been overused into uselessness, so it gets reflexively downvoted. Besides, communism in the original sense is realistically dead. The Berlin Wall has been down for almost 30 years. So people complaining about it in the present come across as McCarthyite.
(I think your original comment would have gone down better if it had been clearer about the past tense - that communism did destroy a lot of small businesses, but this is not an ongoing thing)
I used have because these businesses remain to be dead, there are not new ones in their place, only a group of shady businessmen that own all the properties and rents them to scam shops. I think that is an important distinction. Today no businesses would be destroyed by them of course, but there is also no business to destroy.
The event's meaning is not the same on this side of the curtain. All but mandatory attendance (sometimes with people literally checking names off a list), officials' speeches and military parades tend to sour the mood somewhat, and, from what I can tell, that memory lingers still. These days, many people just use it as an extra day off.
They don't call it that and don't behave like that, so no. They have anti-NATO, anti-USA and pro-Russia banners (and one pro-China). But there was a march earlier, at another place. I believe the anti-communists were there as well.
I was born in a communist country, you don't need to tell me. There was Labor day march elsewhere, as I wrote in the previous comment. This was a protest. They did not move and actually did call themselves a protest, not march (if you asked about that, they pointed you to the march that was elsewhere and also at another time later in the day).
All right, but I was saying so from the perspective and for the potential benefit of US readers, who celebrate Labor Day in the fall.
As for your other point, at least here in Switzerland, the delineation between "march" and "protest" is not so clear, and May Day usually features both.
It’s an interesting point. Is there a perceptible difference for Berliners between E/W shop types?