Just curious but why specify East Germans versus Germans. Is the Berlin Wall back up?
What I heard were complaints on
* privatization by the West and sometimes closure of enterprises. People of age 40 and older remember well the tough years after unification when their parents had no job and had to take a lower-level one.
* they claim that management of states and enterprises was taken over by the Wessies
* a lot of complaints about amerikanization of the culture and aligning with the US in every international policy question under Merkel. I regret I did not ask further about the culture, but just an example: by default radio stations in Germany put American music, more than stations in other Western European countries that I heard. It's very hard to stumble upon songs in German, just as any other language but English. (If you listen to French stations, foreign non-English music is much more probable to hear.)
* East Germans are more atomized and secular. That's similar to other East European contries.
* Women were forced to emansipate in the East, because they needed to work, whereas in the West they could afford being housewifes. And a surprising consequence, in the West a man can't be friends with a married woman -- Ossies living in the West complained of that too.
That's what I've heard from them and some my own superficial impressions from radio. I can't confirm that, but sure it's more or less founded info.
Nah, that's no longer true as of today. It used to be like that in the 60+ generation, but among younger people, it really depends on the partners involved.
Some West germans still look down on Ossies, even though Merkel was one herself. It's a lot like how northern states look down on southern states in the U.S.
The cure for this is immigration, but the people that remain in the rural areas are very right wing and very xenophobic.
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fvoxeu.org...
"Average Wage in Germany by County
Notes: Average daily wages obtained from a 50% random sample of establishments via the Establishment History Panel (BHP) of the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). Real wages are expressed in 2007 euros valued in Bonn, the former capital of West Germany, using county-specific prices. East–West border is drawn for clarification; there is no border today."
TL;DR: at the 50th percentile, net worth of west germans was ~40k in 2012 vs ~14k for east germans (in euros).
IIRC the discrepancy between population share and elite share for Ossis is even worse than for American blacks.
I remember when the reunification started I firmly believed that the East would quickly get up to speed once the Western system was applied there. It should be easy and the Easterners would be happy. Turns out that progress was slow despite enormous investments and the Easterners didn't really appreciate that the West completely ignored things that Easterners actually liked (their "achievements" = "Errungenschaften" was a big word).
When you consider how difficult the process was/is despite East and West Germany being very close culturally it becomes clear that things like "fixing" and "democratizing" countries like Afghanistan and Iraq are pretty hopeless endeavors. I don't think as Westerner you can even remotely understand the culture and the fact that maybe the people there don't want Western culture.
In the sense that someone from a state over would be viewed very differently than someone from up north.
Caveat: This is almost imperceptible in major urban centers, and far more of a thing in rural areas.
Same at first, but then having spent time in the South years ago I also realized the prejudice from the North on the South for economic reasons.
The South is typically seen as the most affluent of all of Germany and depending on the Stat the most influenced by politics: as in the case with Baden-Wuttenburg and the Green Party. Hell, people from the Schwabish part (Stutgart) are used looked down on by the rest of Baden-Wuttenburg for being typically very stingy and aloof (even by German standards) and seen as not worth building ties with. I had a bad experience with them, after being warmly welcomed in Germany, but I took that more a random situation rather than anything worth looking deeper into.
It's frankly a very odd situation and makes you wonder why they're even united at all, I spent time in the North near Cologne this summer and to be honest the amount of Turkish people was a very welcomed sight especially how well integrated they were in Society.
I wish I could have remained with that feeling because stuff like this makes me realize how deeply scarred the German psyche is in regards to this topic.