Fresh!

Ok, I admit that spring has its advantages.

Straight out of the greenhouse (except for the corn):

Nationality?

While applying online for a job at a university in the UK, I found the following in the drop down menu for the category "nationality":

At first of course I had to laugh because I really have experienced a lot of strange questionnaires while applying for a visa for the USA but I've never seen two choices of nationality for Germans. 

Later on of course I was wondering what on earth these people were thinking when they put this option into the list. They certainly cannot be THAT ignorant that they do not know that this G-country roughly in the middle of Europe has been united more than 20 years ago. So let's assume that whoever created this drop down menu has paid attention to their history lesson - what do you want to imply by that? 

We are one country by choice - people who lived in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) had no freedom of speech, no freedom to travel, they lived in a totalitarian system which they did not want to keep. So do you think that more than 20 years after the reunification, they would want to be labeled to be different Germans than the "other" Germans (are they supposed to be German (West) ???). I don't come from the eastern parts of Germany but if I did I'd find this highly discriminatory. Of course we still have our problems and people in the east still get lower salaries than people in the west and we tease each other about dialects and how we deal with things (but almost all other nations do that too) and certainly there might be a few nutters who want the old system back BUT we are one nation and despite our horrible history there is one thing we can be proud of: Germany was reunited in a non-violent revolution  (of course not counting all the people who have been killed while trying to leave the GDR and those who disappeared ...) and we managed to grow together after all these years of separation.