Interflug was the only East German airline seen here with a TU 134

Germans call it 'Ostalgie', an irrational love of the workers' cacotopia that was Honecker's East Germany. East Berlin stank of Russian petrol and had cardboard Czech shoes in flyblown shop windows. People ate coal.

You can still find apartments in East Berlin that have showers in the kitchen or so-called "Plattenbauten" with renovated facades in the district of Marzahn. And on Unter den Linden, Ostalgie shops feed the tourist need for memorabilia. At Checkpoint Charly, you can walk down memory lane by shooting a picture with Soviet and American dressed soldiers. There is money to be made with the Cold War.

Never mind pre-modern consumer products, such as the misguided German engineering effort, the Trabi and from a convenience standpoint, indoor coal heating, which stil exists in select eastern cities. In the winter months, you're bound to make some trips to the basement accompanied with moderate health issues once it burns.

Today, post-communist Russia and China have hired architects from the West to ensure that Ostalgie is a thing of the past. They have partially adapted capitalism to make it fit according to their own needs. Russia is competing with Airbus and western tourists in Turkey, whereas China continues to copy German wood saws and provides the States with ample amount of products found in Macys and Bloomingdales.

As Stephen Bayley points out in todays Observer, one of the greatest legacies of the Cold War era weren't consumer products, but rather the space these words are in: the Internet. And the interpretation of its use varies from cognitive surplus, secure free movement of the US command, Google data mining and telling everyone about your new haircut.