Ostalgie, nostalgia for the East German dictatorship, a phenomenon that is part kitsch, part ignorance and all stupidity, is something that disgraces modern Germany. Here’s a corrective, the tale of a 14 year old locked up for playfully (if unwisely) fooling with a picture of Stalin.

Her reward?

“In three East German prisons, including a former Nazi concentration camp, she was repeatedly raped, starved and beaten. Finally she was forced to endure a mock mass extermination in a gas chamber.”

“In the book, [the author] describes how, as a teenager in the East German town of Muhlhausen, she was bemused to see a portrait of Stalin hanging in her school, in exactly the same place that Hitler’s portrait had hung only a few months earlier.”

Just the right place for it, I would think.

Bastards.