After twenty years of growth, labor shortages threaten to derail the economies of Central and Eastern Europe. Since the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia joined the EU in 2004, followed by Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, their economies have been boosted through a combination of capital from multinationals and cheap and well-educated local workers.
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‘Sex at last!’ was the headline of an article in the German weekly Die Zeit about the opening of the first sex shop in Leipzig, East Germany in June 1990. These were the dying days of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a country whose citizens “were not allowed to show themselves naked or see the naked bodies of others, except at the nudist beach.” “The workers and peasants,” the article went on, “could only practice voyeurism under the covers of the marriage bed.” The collapse of the Berlin Wall, Communism and the impending unification were giving them, at last, the opportunity to make up for lost time, according to the article’s author.
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A new report on how EU member states address the legacy of the Holocaust claims that several Central and East European countries are seeing widespread historical revisionism and are downplaying of World War II crimes. The report was published two days before January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which marks the anniversary of the liberation of Nazi Germany’s most notorious death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered.
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In socially conservative Poland, a new museum opened this summer: the Polish LGBTQIA Museum. The museum aims to preserve the history of non-heteronormative people in Poland by documenting their stories. Its collection includes a variety of archival materials — from posters, photographs, flyers, leaflets, and magazines to DIY zines and film clips. The museum is virtual and therefore accessible from anywhere in the world.
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