Germany still remains divided between East & West

‘East German or West German?’ 

“Wanderers and seekers.”

Excerpted in part from Germany in crisis, Part 4

 By Patrick Lawrence

There are commonly accepted ways to measure the inequalities between the two halves of the reconstituted Federal Republic. Wages are lower in the former German Democratic Republic [GDR] than in the west, by 25 percent. Unemployment in the east is higher than in the west—by a third. Good jobs are scarcer in the old G.D.R., as most of the strong, powerful industries that earned Germany its success—steel, autos, machinery, chemicals, electronics—are in the western half. As those who live in the former G.D.R. will readily explain, most senior positions in the eastern states—in the now-privatized enterprises, the universities, the banks, and so on—are held by Germans from the west.

In this way “reunification” is not quite the word for what happened on 3 October 1990: Better to say it effectively turned East Germany into a colony of West Germany. Resentment, an obvious consequence, is easily legible in the [recent national election] February results. In the eastern states the three opposition parties —AfD, Die Linke, B.S.W.—easily outperformed the mainstream parties as measured against the previous elections. There are some protest voters in the numbers, as many of the Germans with whom I spoke—not all, I must add—told me. But protest is not all there is to read into the results. Voters in the old G.D.R. are also more ardent than in the west as they search for a new national direction.

I come again to questions of identity and consciousness. East Germans were never subjected to those fateful Americanization programs the postwar Federal Republic [west] endured during the Cold War years. There was no psychological unmooring as occurred among West Germans. This different experience has born profound consequences. East Germans were not, so to say, separated from themselves as West Germans were; their identities were by comparison undisturbed.

As those in the eastern states often explain, they developed an abiding distrust of authority during the G.D.R. years. But a paradox here: It was in their resistance to the East German state that East German people preserved who they were, what it was that made them German. And it is this distrust and resistance that informs their views and attitudes today toward Berlin and the west of Germany—their disdain, their refusals. More than one easterner told me they view the centrist regime in Berlin as another dictatorship.

An hour’s drive east of Dresden, across vast flat stretches of what were once collective farms, you come to a town in Saxony called Bautzen. The French commonly speak of la France profonde, “deep France,” literally—the untouched France of the old villages and farms. Bautzen, it seems useful to say, lies in what we can think of as deep Deutschland. You find in the place and its people another idea of Germany—alive and well enough, precisely the Germany the neoliberal centrists in Berlin appear determined to extinguish.

Bautzen, with a population of 38,000, has a varied history. It traces its beginning to the early 11th century and is pleased today to display its origins in the Middle Ages. (If you like Medieval towers, this is your place: A dozen of them still mark out the town’s perimeters.) The Third Reich operated a concentration camp there, part of the Groß–Rosen network. The Red Army liberated the Bautzen subcamp on 20 April 1945, five days before Soviet troops met the Allies at the Elbe. From 1952 until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the East German Stasi used the former camp as a notorious prison nicknamed Gelbes Elend, Yellow Misery, for the color of its walls.

During the G.D.R. days the people of Bautzen began what they called “Monday night demonstrations” at Gelbes Elend. At their largest these weekly occasions attracted up to 5,000 people, and they had a standard slogan. “We are the people” can be fully understood only in its historical context. The G.D.R. advanced itself as “the people’s democracy,” or “the people’s republic.” The words chanted at the protests outside the Stasi prison on Mondays were a pointed reply, the stress in the phrase falling in translation on the first word: “We are the people.”

At the end of my visit to Bautzen, I met for dinner with some of those who led those demonstrations. We gathered at a cavern-like restaurant that had long ago been a monastery. The waiters wore monks’ robes and the menu featured (for better or worse) Medieval dishes. The beer (for the better) was also from an old recipe—a rich red brew served in crude clay steins. I do not know whether our hosts intended this, but Mönchshof zu Bautzen, as the place was called, was faintly suggestive of their project. This was to rediscover what it means to be authentically German—not in any kind of nativist or reactionary fashion, but as self-preservation, a defense against the neoliberalism Berlin sponsors.

The Monday demonstrations spread widely during the G.D.R. decades and were six-figures large in Dresden, Leipzig, and other cities. They continue now, if on a much smaller scale. And the slogan at all of them is a straight carryover: “We are the people” is still in its way a response to the pretensions of power in Berlin. Working through an interpreter, I asked those ranged around our table, an assemblage of rough-hewn boards, what their politics were. “AfD? Die Linke? Sahra Wagenknecht’s B.S.W.?” The last is a left-populist breakaway from The Left.

“We take no interest in the political parties, none of them,” one of my hosts said. “We don’t think in terms of ‘left’ and ‘right,’ either. We come together on the basis of facts. We’re trying to build what you would call ‘a people’s movement.’”

The phrase—how to say this?—did not instill confidence. To an American ear “a people’s movement” suggested I was at a table of dreamers in one of who knows how many towns reunification had served badly. When I mentioned this to Karl–Jürgen Müller, the student of German politics, he replied, “You’re looking at the tip of an iceberg. Beneath the surface there’s a lot more of this.”

This seemed the case as the evening went on and those assembled told me of the conferences and congresses they organize regularly with other communities. In the back of the notebook I used that evening I find a well-produced accordion brochure announcing a Kongress Frieden und Dialog, a Congress for Peace and Dialogue, in Liebstedt, a Thuringian town near Weimar, 260 kilometers distant.

I had heard the same frustration with Germany’s traditional party politics many times in the course of my reporting. I do not mean to suggest any kind of imminent nationwide insurgency. What I saw at ground level seemed to me nascent, a suggestion and no more of a possible future. As we drove back from Bautzen to Dresden I thought of something Dirk Pohlmann, the broadcast journalist and documentarian, had said when we spoke in Potsdam. “We’re sitting atop a tectonic shift,” he told me. “The Greens are done. The Free Democrats [among the other big losers in February] are done. The major parties are weak. People are looking for unities on questions of right and wrong. ‘Left’ and ‘right’ have nothing to do with this.”

 ~ Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century.