I've crossed the allegedly "caged border" several times to visit family and vice versa.

People tend to forget that back then border regimes, with often complex visa regulations, existed everywhere. It's not like Europe was the EU and everybody had freedom of movement except for people from the GDR.

No, visas were still required over the place, borders were reinforced and heavily controlled from both sides, both sides treated you like a pseudo-criminal by completely and utterly taking your belongings apart to suppress any possible smuggling. Which was mostly down to the fact of the two Germany's also serving as a cold war border.

But adding any nuance like that to these discussions is simply not allowed, the only thing allowed is equating the GDR, and the people who lived in it, with Nazi Germany at worst, at best as a bunch of people that had to be "liberated" economically and socially from the Soviets by their glorious Western saviors.

A narrative that will continue to alienate a rather big part of the population, a problem that becomes slowly noticeable, but has yet to be acknowledged any more meaningful way than the usual Nazi-Keule of "Them East Germans are just neo-Nazis".

> but it's a trivial truth that this is the case every time things change.

The not so trivial truth is that not everything changes to the better for everybody, and in the case of "reunification" a whole lot of things changed for the worse for a whole lot of people, to this day.

You can't just hand-wave that away with "Oh it was inevitable!", when the rushed and one-sided way "reunification" actually happened was absolutely not "inevitable", it was the result of Kohl's ambition to have reunification as his legacy, damned be the actual people and consequences for them.

This cannot really be compensated by money, especially if that money flows back into Western corporations (such as construction companies that build infrastructure).

> Despite these problems, the process of unification moved ahead, albeit slowly. The Treuhand, staffed almost entirely by Germans from the west, became the virtual government of eastern Germany.

I agree, I would like to have a better background on this. The West did face severe difficulties & extreme extreme burdens of it's own in trying to support & integrate. But it continually feels to me like the image of this being a take-over are not unfounded. Trying to figure out a way to sustain & support the economy, to allow space for a more graceful self-rule, under which terms transition could be better, more slowly explored would have been immensely interesting. Instead, we got a much fairer, nicer version of what was just starting to happen somewhat East of Germany, in the wake of the fall of the USSR ten months three weeks earlier: a sell off, a economic re-dividing up of spoils, a commercialization of a nation.

There were huge huge challenges, and it's not as simple at all as saying capitalism is at fault here. This wasn't even necessarily predatory. The world continues to have faith above all in the GDP, in macro-economics. The drive to push GDP up, by all means, quickly, or else (given the economic troubles faced) is a very real & valid survival reflex; quite understandable. It's hard to imagine what alternatives there were, especially given the already fairly dire economic state of East Germany/the German Democratic Republic at the time, but I don't think it is a "very weirdly biased view" at all that I nor wikipedia present: that the GDR was coerced into change, rapidly, by external forces, with little respect to self-determinism & little chance given for the people to figure out a way forward to try to support each other, in a less ambitiously bottom-line oriented manner.

I'm a little more aware of the contemporary situation, where there is an alarming rise of far-right angry-popularism. From the same sort of economically-left-behind folks who feel left out of modern society. And while I think their reaction is malformed, I can sympathize with their anger and recognize the common problems faced by "rural America" and much of East Germany.

Anyhow, you've rather told me I'm full of shit, and I'd like rather much if you could find something beyond criticism to offer to this conversation. Do you have any materials or suggestions for the readers here?

The Treuhandgesellschaft and Kohl are topics you will come across extremely polarized opinions from "Best thing ever" to "Worst thing ever", but these kind of controversies rarely make it out of the German language sphere, as they require a fair bit of deeper understanding not just about German history, but also about German political culture.

In that context The Perfect Crime on Netflix is a pretty good piece of documentary shining a light on parts of German history that, particularly West Germans, just love to gloss over but have in East Germany lead to deep scars lasting to this day.

I don't think, that western Germany is solely to blame, though. If you look into the "Klassenfeind" in eastern Germany, that is entrepreneurs, bourgeoise, Christians, even just small-scale craftsman, they all did rather well after a short transition. But they did so in a very difficult environment: The masses of workers, educated to be lead by and taken care of, by the state were now completely on their own. Underqualified faced an especially dire situation: In eastern Germany even the most inept would have some payed position, even though they were completely useless there. It was basically an alternative to unemployment. Now these, say, 5% of the workforce never had been told that they should have some qualification to get some work. They simply expected some simple position to be created for them (I personally met some of these people, btw.). These people never faced a chance on the labor market.