Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

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East Germany still faces incredible far ranging economic & societal difficulties after the West Germans swept in, strong armed the state, offered little support, & privatized all industry.

The economy was having enormous difficulties. Rather than support & help the population, it was GDP & GDP alone that was focused on.

My sources for what happened then are mostly the 4-part netflix drama The Perfect Crime, about the assassination of the Trust Agency head who paved over communism with capitalism. Not fancy, so I'm not super well versed. The movie doesn't go far into the aftermath, which, if you look at East Germany, has many of the scariest Trumpist vibes one might imagine to it. People got left the heck behind. It was a conquest not an integration.

Edit: People seem to really really hate that I cited my sources and it's not good enough. Perhaps a wikipedia quote to confirm some of my stance might make you modestly less skeptical? My words are radical but the situation itself was too:

> 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. In the course of privatization, the agency decided which companies would live and which would die, which communities would thrive and which would shrivel, and which eastern Länder would be prosperous and which would not. It also decided who might or might not buy eastern firms or services.

I'd like to find a way to hand out more credit, to be fairer, and I lack that expertise. My apologies. This was an incredibly difficult situation. Yet, it feels very much, the German "reunification" was a one way integration, was one country taking over another, with few chances at all for the German Democratic Republic government & people to try to self-determine what path forward they wanted to take towards reunification.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_Germ...

> Offered little support

Support peaked at 1/3rd of GDP. At the time, there were a lot of critics (domestic and foreign) of how expensive Kohl's vision of rebuilding the East was.

I'm not saying: the East has caught up, it was handled perfectly, there aren't still problems, there aren't ugly political problems.

I am saying you have a very weirdly biased view of what happened, and maybe should consider not single-sourcing your history to tee vee shows, or at least recognize the limits of doing so.

One of the obvious problems is that Ossis are still massively underrepresented in the German elite. Only a tiny proportion of big business owners are Eastern, the proportion of Easterners among university professors or judges is smaller than expected, even in the new Länder, the same applies in culture.

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

The Chancellor of Germany for the last 15 years is an East German.

That feels a little bit like pointing at Obama to prove there's no racism in the US.

Among the "Pack" (East German equivalent of "deplorables"), she is considered a traitor. Look at this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tnnjry_v-hY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeQnHaeZyHU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3hLkebbOms

Support was offered, on West Germany's terms. As per wikipedia,

> 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?

> My sources are mostly the 4-part netflix drama[...]

Seriously!?

Still, they are correct. I can tell you from first-hand experience that this is what happened to many east Germans. Mass unemployment, deserted cities and rural areas, general loss of perspective lead to many social problems, right-wing extremism one of them.

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.

Prior to Covid, I visited former GDR several times.

Places like Hoyerswerda are the worst German-speaking communities I ever saw, the spirit of hopelessness permeates everything.

Even in cities like Görlitz that were restored to their original beauty, the loss of population has been so enormous that entire building blocks are empty, the windows blinded by years of dust. Ghost neighbourhoods, very untypical for Europe.

Zittau on the Czech border has lost like a third of population within thirty years. Many of the remaining residents are over 70.

Given how many Internet commenters think they’re experts on Chernobyl now, it’s not like he’s alone.

A lot of these topics don't even get that much mainstream coverage in the German language sphere because there's no real common ground to be found.

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.

From my American perspective I think the reason nobody talks about it in West Germany is because honest talk about German history has been ruthlessly suppressed by nearly all the institutions of the German state, including the state media. This is not healthy, people should be exposed to the best of all different perspectives.

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