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So Egbert Rimkus was 34 years old in the summer of 1996.

And by most accounts, he was the kind of person who approached life with a certain deliberate energy.

He worked as an architect in Dresden in the former East Germany, and architecture suits a particular kind of mind, someone comfortable thinking in systems, who can hold a large structure in their head and move through it logically, who trusts planning specifically.

But to understand Egbert, you have to understand Dresden in 1996, because the city he lived and worked in was still in the middle of a convulsion that had no real Western equivalent.

Because when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989,

most of the world watched and celebrated.

But for the people who actually lived in East Germany, what followed wasn't quite the liberation it looked like from the outside.

And reunification triggered an economic collapse that wiped out millions of jobs almost overnight.

Factories closed, credentials became worthless, and the agencies brought in to manage the transition were staffed almost entirely by West Germans operating under West German rules.

And many East Germans didn't experience it as freedom.

They experienced it as being taken over, basically.

And there's actually a German word for the nostalgia that emerged from this period, Ostalgie, a mashup of Ost, meaning east,

and nostalgi, and it would describe something that a lot of people just genuinely felt.

So for a professional like Egbert, the impact was specific.

In GDR era architectural training, qualifications and professional networks became largely obsolete overnight.

And building codes, construction standards, licensing requirements, and client structures all changed.