I recently made friends with a very nice German woman, Ines, who shares with me a love of bikes and good eating. We ate dinner at her flat the other night and her hilarious friend told us stories about hitchhiking in America. He got a ride once from a state trooper in West Virginia, who asked what part of Germany was he from... "the east part, or the west part." He tried his best to explain that it really is a fairly unified country and there is not really a clean division between people who like freedom and people who like communism. Apparently then the dispatcher, upon learning the trooper was giving him a ride, asked over the radio, "is he from the east part, or the west part?"
He also told us a story about a friend who was for some reason staying with a rural American family. They were very nice people, incredibly welcoming, and thought it would be really great to bake him a cake with the german flag on it. Unfortunately, they did not know that the german flag has changed periodically in the last century, and he was a little weirded out, obviously, to be welcomed by a cake with a swastika on it. They weren't neo-nazis or even racists, they just legitimately believed that it was still the symbol of Germany.