A new study has revealed that the infamous “Jammer-Ossi” (that bitchy, forever-lamenting and ungrateful East German species we-all-themselves-included admire so much) does not exist anymore.

The study also indicates that we, as in you, should actually admire and even emulate them. The East Germans have made it through much harder times than the world is going through right now and blah, blah, blah and not only that, their Ostalgie about those wonderful-old good-old communist days isn’t what you think it is because, well, it just isn’t.

The study is entitled “The East Germans Twenty Years after the Turning Point” and certainly sounds scientific enough to me. The researchers actually went out there and interviewed some eighty (80) people between the ages of 18 (born after the fall of the Berlin Wall) and 70 (born after the fall of the Jericho Wall). They even used psychological tests or something.

Talk about another prime example of theory meeting practice, or vice versa. I still hear all kinds of jammering all day long over here (other than my own, I mean) and it has to be coming from somewhere, people. My theory is that this particular type of jammering has simply gone down in the greater jammering noise in the meantime. To West German ears, I mean. If everybody out there is jammering, and of course everybody is, you just can’t hear that specific East German brand anymore. Those sinus wave thingies have overlaped or something.

No, sorry. The Jammer-Ossies may not exist anymore, but they are certainly still alive – and kicking. I mean bitching.

“Die Menschen im Osten begegneten überzogenen Träumen mit einem konstruktiven Misstrauen und Realismus, der sich deutlich von den oft überbordenden Glücks- und Renditeansprüchen des westlichen Maximierungsdenkens abhebt.”