Re:The Closing of the Bulgarian Frontier
by hackandthink on Thursday December 21, 2023 @05:10AM
(#38718759)
My experience in Berlin after the Wall came down also goes in this direction.
For me as a young West Berliner, it was a fun time with lots of opportunities.
For many people in the former GDR it was a trauma, their lives collapsed.
And Bulgaria has not received high transfer payments.
Re:The Closing of the Bulgarian Frontier
by ionyun on Thursday December 21, 2023 @05:52AM
(#38718983)
The authors viewpoint seem to be very much influenced by being somewhat well-off and therefor being able to chooses which changes to participate in. Now they increasingly find themselves being like everyone else and conclude that things have changed, while this was what was happening all along.
So it is more a personal frontier than anything else. A frontier is usually where little exists and by building something from the ground up you have more to say about things. While most people may not have had much of a say in the first place what happened in Eastern Europe and also more slowly in the rest of Europe was still mostly the opposite. It has been more of a frontier for others, like the French bank mentioned, than the local population.
No, they didn't, maybe some of the newly well-off people wanted to do that, like the parents and grandparents of the author of the article here, and that was mostly happening because they could afford to fail because they had money, but the great, great majority of people in Eastern Europe back in the '90s most certainly didn't "want to do something bold with their newfound freedom", they just wanted to be able to, like, literally live, meaning to be able to pay the bills and to put food on the table. Both of those things (paying the bills and putting food on the table) had become impossible for many of our parents back then, my parents eventually did have to sell their one-bedroom apartment in the early 2000s because of unpaid bills.
But I get it, the children of the well-off people from the 1990s went on to study in the West and now they're back lecturing us about this and that and that other thing. Maybe they could just try and open their eyes a little more and realise how difficult and excruciatingly hard life was for the majority of us back then, people who didn't have our parents join well-paid jobs in Western companies.
I'm not Bulgarian, but I did grew up in a city just 11 kms from the border with Bulgaria, one of my first memories as a kid is going with my mum to a Bulgarian border city in order buy some stuff from there (in the mid-80s the Bulgarian stores had more diverse stuff compared to stores in Romania). I'm also about the same age as the author of the article, I think a year older, thereabouts.