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.
Great times. Make DDR great again.
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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.
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No, just need to find that image again. Got wiped out with an account problem last week.
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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.
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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.
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