Welcome back, Lenin. Apparently, some people have started yet another discussion about West German colonialism in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 led to a reunification process that took less than a year and thoroughly abolished reminders of the former GDR. At the time, East Germans were not too hung up on reminders of the socialist regime they had just liberated themselves from, but as time went by, many seemed to develop a certain Nostalgia regarding all things labeled \”GDR\” that was – as far as I know – rather unique in the former communist Eastern Europe. Now some people apparently want to reerect a statue of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin. I think it is ok to have a statue of Marx in Berlin. He was wrong in many respects, but he was an important social thinker and not really responsible for the horrors others have read into his texts. Lenin was one, albeit not the worst, of them. It’s ok, even fun, to have GDR-motto parties – but not to reerect statues of the first communist dictator. It’s just as if there weren’t any other problems to deal with.