I was in Leipzig for a few days for my brother-in-law's first wedding in the early 2000s. Driving around we saw quite a few abandoned villas with pockmarks fro

I was in Leipzig for a few days for my brother-in-law's first wedding in the early 2000s. Driving around we saw quite a few abandoned villas with pockmarks from bullets from WW2. We also saw one street with apartments that were still occupied by some hard-core communists that the government seemed to leave alone as they were contained. It kind of felt like time had slowed in Leipzig after the war. It reminded me of a quote I heard from a guide when we toured a home near the harbor (now government owned) in Gloucester, MA that a family had lived in for generations and never updated: "Nothing preserves like poverty".