I was reading something the other day from a woman who was a teenager living in communist east Germany struggling with the total lack of agency she felt in life. She described how to fight that she started painting pebbles purple and placing them at random spots across her town and imagining how nuts it would have driven the Stasi trying to break the code the resistance movement were using with these signals they were sending each other. It was the only thing she could think of to add some control of her own life.
Nostalgia for the DDR isn’t a new phenomenon. Basically exists since the DDR was gone. And let’s not forget that ‘Die Linke’ , which used to be a big thing in East Germany, is the successor party to the PDS, which is a successor party of the DDR’s state party SED. And now the BSW of course is largely old members of Die Linke. The BSW is more of a reboot, let’s make Die Linke more Eastern again - more Russian, less ‘western woke’, less scary immigrants from strange foreign places. AfD is full of old Stasi people as well btw.
Nevertheless it’s a bit of lazy answer for everything. But yeah, there are obviously cultural reasons beyond the economic that come from that time.
I’m sure there have been plenty of psychological studies done on the topic, but from my experience as someone who’s lived and worked in Berlin for over thirty years, the differences between those from the western part of Germany (and the city itself), and those from the east is still stark, even 35 years after the fall of the wall.
Those who lived in the DDR are often prone to ‘Ostalgie’, nostalgia for the former regime. This seems to be based mainly on the security that the communist system provided. There was no official unemployment, everyone had some kind of a job, even if it was a meaningless task. Everyone had a place to live, even if it was a drab flat in a concrete block. Bringing up children was basically paid for by the state and everyone was protected from competition and insecurity.
Of course, all that came at the expense of freedom. Movement, speech and aspiration were curtailed, but at least you didn’t have to worry about the basics.
This lead to an introspective society, wary of foreign or exotic influences, and this feeling continues to this day. Even those born since 1989 grow up in this atmosphere and are influenced to think that things were better in the good old days. This makes for fertile ground for unscrupulous politicians who want to exploit the public’s fears of insecurity and instability by blaming the usual suspects. The really frightening thing for the majority of the people in the western states, is the normalisation of Nazi ideology and rhetoric. They grew up in a society that was fiercely determined to banish fascism and to be constantly aware of the need to be on guard against its return.
As a long-term resident and German passport holder I share their dismay.
Ironically of course those East Germans old enough would have grown up with a DDR ideology and propaganda that saw itself as the real Antifascists, and would commonly refer to West Germany and the Western world as fascists. Even the wall was supposedly Anti-Fascist protection.
Quite common trope of the AfD is to claim that East Germans are more alert to dictatorship and therefore resist the supposed new Western woke propaganda and dicatorship. Worked like a charm during and after Covid especially.
Of course they regularly paint themselves and their opinions as being oppressed and love to draw comparisons to Nazi Deutschland as well (them being the victims of course). They know it’s nonsensical bullshit, but think of it as a brilliant rhetoric trick (‘You call us Nazis. You’re the Nazis. See what I did there’).
It’s amazing how anyone can twist history in whatever direction they please.
As I said in the General World Politics thread, this is what happens when you let the far-right dictate the discourse around immigration. You have cowards in “mainstream” parties try to adopt the same positions, which renders voting for them moot, since you might as well vote for the parties that haven’t, in the narrative, “failed” on the topic of immigration.
To be fair, while it’s bad news to see this abject nationalist party raise again, it’s nothing new. They have already been the first party of the country, a couple of decades ago or so, with Jörg Haider at the helm.
So, nothing new. Austrians have a nationalist and at times xenophopic culture. When Hitler made the Anschluss in 1938, a large majority of Austrians were delighted. After the war, a lot of people continued to think that Hitler’s only mistake was to have lost it. That has gone throughout the post-war period. As said, I’m disappointed, but not surprised. Austria has been and still is a favourable breeding ground for hard-line nationalism.
If the Eurozone in your graph is the current Eurozone, you have to remember that a lot of countries from the former Warsaw pact were integrated into the EU between 2004 and 2013. Their economy had to be rebuilt from scratch, and is still yet a work in progress, so that could explain a part of that apparent stagnation. Also, the UK left the Eurozone in 2020. That’s a big percentage of the EU economy not in that count anymore.
There are surely other factors, but your graph isn’t very telling imo.
The UK was never in it. The Eurozone refers to nations using the €. The period covered includes the whole Eurozone crisis so it isn’t a very good start and end point to pick. It also picks the starting point as the place that the € was highest (over) valued against the $:
The Eurozone refers to the currency union, or those countries that use the Euro as its home currency. It does not refer to the EU. The UK was part of the EU but was never part of the Eurozone. So the UK leaving the EU does not affect the measurement of the Eurozone GDP.
No country has left the Eurozone. In fact, over the course of that graph, countries joined the Eurozone, including Malta, Cypress and the Baltics. So the measurement of aggregate output would have been biased to the upside by the inclusion of those countries, albeit by a small amount.
