One in five Germans want the Berlin Wall back: poll

BERLIN: One in five Germans would like to have the Berlin Wall back, according to a poll released Monday ahead of the 17th anniversary of German reunification.   

Nineteen percent of respondents surveyed said the country was better off while it was divided, while 75 percent said they were glad the Wall that kept easterners captives of the communist bloc for 28 years had fallen.   

Remarkably, a full 21 percent of the country's 16.7 million easterners felt nostalgic about the concrete, barbed wire and armed guards that separated them from the west.   

The poll conducted among by independent opinion research firm Emnid found that 74 percent of easterners had felt like second-class citizens since Germany reunited on October 3, 1990.   

About the same share of westerners -- 73 percent -- said they did not believe that easterners were at a disadvantage.   

The communist regime of East Germany erected the Berlin Wall in 1961 to stop a flood of refugees to the west.

The Wall tumbled in a peaceful revolution in November 1989, paving the way to national unification 11 months later.   

The former communist east has lagged behind economically since then despite more than one trillion dollars in aid from the west.   

Salaries in the east remain 25 percent lower than in the west, according to the Institute for Labour Market and Career Research in the southern city of Nuremberg.  

And unemployment hovers at about 15 percent in the eastern states compared to half that in the west.