When the German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, moves to Berlin next month, his new office will look directly on to one of communist East Germany's most notorious architectural outrages, the Palast der Republik, or Palace of the Republic. A great concrete slab filled with thousands of hideous, 1970s-style lights, it was known to easterners as "Erich's lamp shop", after the East German leader, Erich Honecker.
Mr Schroder would like to tear the building down and replace it with a replica of the old Prussian city palace that stood on the same site until the 1950s. But easterners are steadfastly opposed to the idea, insisting that the Palast der Republik must be preserved.
Ten years after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, it is hard to find an easterner with an unkind word to say about the German Democratic Republic. Although few admit to wishing that German reunification had never happened, most now remember the communist era with affection.
When asked what they associate with life before reunification, most easterners identify economic security, orderliness and a strong sense of community, with neighbours taking care of one another. Many neighbours took rather too close an interest in the activities of others but, as the years go by, the totalitarian character of the East German state is being quietly forgotten.
After the excitement that followed reunification, most easterners settled back into their old routines, and it is still possible to live in the east almost as if the German Democratic Republic had never collapsed.
In the vast housing complexes of east Berlin, thousands still read Neues Deutschland, the former official party daily, and breakfast on bread rolls made to a different recipe from those in the west.
Tens of thousands of parents put their children through the Jugendweihe, an atheist form of confirmation, and many still smoke the same cigarettes and drink the same beer as they did before the Wall came down.
Westerners are horrified by the nostalgia their eastern neighbours feel for a system that was demonised in the west as illiberal, unjust and murderous. And western politicians are bewildered by the continuing success of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the successor to the Socialist Unity Party that ruled East Germany for 40 years.
Mr Schroder's Social Democrats (SPD) share power with the PDS in one eastern state already and depend on the support of the former communists in another. State elections later this year could produce more such coalitions, giving the former communists a significant voice in the upper house of parliament, the Bundesrat.
Many PDS politicians held official posts under the old regime, giving them a public profile few civil rights activists could rival. Most of the dissidents who led the peaceful revolution against communism have quietly retreated from political life, often embittered by the popular hostility towards them. For ordinary easterners, such heroes are an uncomfortable reminder of the compromises they made in their own, less heroic lives under communism.
Even in Saxony, where the Christian Democrats govern with an overall majority, the struggle to confront the past truthfully has run out of steam. A nurse called Monika Schmidt has become a local martyr after she was sacked for lying about her past as a Stasi informer.
Ms Schmidt denied in a questionnaire that she had ever worked for the secret police, but a trawl through the files found that she had been a part-time agent code-named "Jana". She insists that she was a victim of the system rather than one of its villains, recruited at 18 by a Romeo agent she subsequently married.
Her former husband used her to gather information on East Germans planning to escape to the West and threatened that, if she did not co-operate, he would divorce her and take custody of their child. She finally left her husband and moved to the West in 1982.
"Would you condemn this woman?" asked the local edition of Bild. Few easterners are willing to condemn Ms Schmidt or any of the other former informers, who made up one-sixth of the population of the east, most of whom claim that they never harmed anyone.
The truth is that thousands of easterners who fell foul of the communist regime are still paying the price of being denied university places or professional opportunities. But in the amnesiac world of post-reunification Germany, it is increasingly difficult to tell the victims from the perpetrators.
