Yep. WW2 legacy resulted in two major additions to the foundations of new Germany: spying on citizens is highly regulated, freedom of speech does not exist for certain types of speech.
No country has total freedom of speech, not even the US. Try telling people you will kill the president, even as a joke, and the FBI will come knocking.
How does it reconcile with it taking nearly 17 years for Germany to outlaw BND from wiretapping DE-CIX?
And while one of the lessons of Nazi Germany is keeping the secret services on a tight leash, that leash has become longer and longer during the cold war. Nowadays, I do not think there is any effective control of Germany's secret services anymore.
https://netzpolitik.org/2015/how-the-german-foreign-intellig...
> How does it reconcile with it taking nearly 17 years for Germany to outlaw BND from wiretapping DE-CIX?
He said only that "is regulated". This is the same like "CIA/NSA/FBI must obey the law". They actually do what they want. (Now the NSA is wiretapping DE-CIX and giving the info to BND)
The state has other laws that regulate its ability to spy on its citizens.
And if those laws become too cumbersome you can always ask a free friendly nation to do your spying for you, and get the info from them. And then cross your fingers that the judiciary will follow yout reasoning when you are found out.
We allow the state to levy taxes, expropriate, imprison, and even kill (war, death sentence) because we have democratically decided that it was necessary for the organisation of our society.
If someone wanted to leave the GDR, were they able to?
If not, why do you think they weren't able to? Why do you think people wanted to leave, and why do you think people wanted to stop them? Why do you think they had to literally shoot people to stop them leaving the country if it wasn't a dictatorship and they were welcome on the other side?
Are you confused about the 'Democratic' part of the name? North Korea also calls itself 'Democratic' today.
Read some history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_East_Germany
> Elections were held but were effectively controlled by the SED and state hierarchy, as noted by Hans Modrow [communist premier of East Germany] and others.
The last premier of East Germany was literally convicted of electoral fraud after unification.
> Modrow did not deny the charges, but argued that the trial was politically motivated and that the court lacked jurisdiction for crimes committed in East Germany
It was a dictatorship. Any reasonable historian or even person there at the time will tell you this. The literal Premier himself didn't even deny it.
Why do you think that has anything to do with whether it is a dictatorship?
Not having free elections makes it a dictatorship (or at least not a democracy). Not allowing people to leave makes it a shitty place to live, but that is separate from if its a dictatorship.
How else do you explain people willing to die to leave and why do you think the party tried to stop them?
> Not having free elections makes it a dictatorship (or at least not a democracy).
That’s how it was! The leader of the dictating party does not deny this is how it was! You’re delusional!
There is a good sign that your free elections aren't when you have 99% percent approval rating on every election. A sharp drop in approval ratings once you no longer control the elections directly may also be indicative of problems with your implementation of democracy.
I don't think this is just a pedantic point. It's good to push back against the labelling of "everything you don't like" with the most convenient wrongthink labels: see the trend towards labeling $BAD_THINGS as communism, terrorism, or more fashionably these days, fascism.
While some folks think a dictatorship requires a single person or small group in charge, it is widespread opinion in Germany, that the GDR was is in fact seen as a "dicatorship by one party", the SED. Mostly (to my understanding) this is based on the lack of separation of powers found in the GDR.
The "dictatorship" question is regulary a topic of more or less philosophical but most certainly emotional debates with each side being sure they are right. I cannot tell the percentage of "dictatorship"/"non-dicatorship" proponents.
(I am no history nerd.)
edit: pls replace "that the GDR was is in fact seen" with "that the GDR is in fact seen" in your mind
The GDR was a dictatorship good and proper. They just avoided giving the impression of having a single leader by speaking through the politbureau. And the local dictators were controlled by the ones in Moscow.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diktatur_des_Proletariats
But jokes aside: if a very small elite clings to power and doesn't allow free elections, doesn't let people live in freedom, even kills them if they try to leave, and eventually is overturned by the people, these are all signs of a "lupenreine" dictatorship, no?