According to a recent poll 17 percent of the population in eastern Germany, formerly the DDR, say that the communist era was better than the current situation.
This may seem surprising since DDR was a totalitarian society with one Stasi agent on every 166 inhabitants, spying and reporting on what people were talking about in private conversations. Anyone saying the wrong things about the government risked prison or even an informal execution without trial.
The other side of the coin is that most people were fairly well off and didn’t have to worry so much about money. Not that they were rich but no one was outright poor either. Just being a citizen of the DDR meant that you had access to healthcare, education and such things that many in the West have to struggle for without necessarily achieving it. This, no doubt, gave rise to a sense of pride.
Today eastern Germany is the poor underdeveloped part of the country that isn’t getting anywhere. Many realize that the freedom of capitalism without money is sometimes less than the freedom back in the DDR. And the pride of being Germans was also lost when they became the “Ossis”, a financial burden of the “Wessis”. In the poll 52 percent say they feel like second class citizens.
I news-googled this poll and got one (sic) hit, this paper in Singapore. Apparently this is not something the mainstream media wants to talk about. But that’s less surprising since they are in deep symbiosis with the political establishment.
I sometimes wonder if capitalism is like a pyramid scheme: best for the early adopters and the gradually worse the later you’re on board.
Filed under: Politics, Society | 4 Comments
Tags: DDR, Ossis, Stasi
I think that observation about capitalism is pretty astute. At the very least I think we can say there are challenges faced by newly capitalist countries that older nations don’t have to worry about.
Nostalgia for communism might seem odd to people who have lived their entire lives in the West, especially if you’re old enough to remember Cold War propaganda. But all of the people I know from Eastern Bloc states miss aspects of the older system. In spite of the many, many objectionable things about the USSR and its allies, there were also some very real and considerable achievements.
I think there is something similar here in Sweden but less extreme. You sometimes hear people talk about the good old days of democratic socialism when we were more equal and had no homelessness.
East Germany relied mostly on the Soviet’s financial support for its survival. I wonder why they did not feel like second-class citizens to their Soviet brothers then.
But what would become of life if it is without adversity and challenges? It was not capitalism and the West that caused the fall of the Berlin Wall; it was the unified sense of further progress was needed that did it.
I don’t think they felt the contempt of the Russians the same way since the shared ideology was one of equality.
True, capitalism didn’t destroy the Soviet empire. Like most empires it collapsed under its own weight. And the people were probably under the illusion that they’d get rich like the “wessis” if they abandoned communism.
But who can blame them for being disappointed? It’s been 19 years since the Wall fell and no real progress so far.