Go here to read the article for a few laughs. East Germany, like the other Soviet satellites, wasn’t a nation but a huge prison camp. Once it was clear that the Soviets were no longer going to play jailers, these nightmares dissolved like so many bad dreams. The nostalgia that some Leftists in the West have for these obscenities is an indication of their ideal state if they only had the power to implement their twisted dreams.
At least the twisted Left Twitter commenter has an honest screen name (“Jacobin”).
The author Gunter Grasse offered some of the same views around 1990. He feared the loss of “equality” and a slower (if poorer) lifestyle compared to what he saw in the West. He seemed to want the DDR to remain independent from but associated with the BDR, free to retain some aspects of its socialist society, as the voters saw fit. Of course what the voters saw fit was to dissolve the DDR. Few who actually endured socialism ever want it back.
You have to hand to the Devil. He can convince some people that living without freedom or rights and having a vicious dictator control you is the best way to live. He did it again with the Covid scam-the worse crime against humanity ever perpetrated.
I read about this yesterday over on Instapundit, and one commenter noted that the author of the idiotic magazine article is an avowed Communist, but is too young ever to have lived under the tender mercies of the Stasi. So no surprises there.
A personal digression: When I was in college (dear old Illinois Wesleyan U), I had the opportunity to spend two consecutive “January short terms” in West Germany, in 1975 and 1976. On one of our visits to some point of interest we encountered, quite by accident, a group of about a dozen East German college-age students who were visiting the same place. I don’t recall now what the place was, but I do vividly recall how utterly joyless the “Osties” all were. They were not allowed to get close enough to us to speak; they sat at tables in the snack bar where we saw them, staring down at their food and barely even speaking with one another. We were not surprised to learn afterward that the “teachers” accompanying their group were in fact Stasi agents, and that such visitations were normally a cover for various types of Stasi activity in the West. Nice people.
I suppose these nostalgia freaks could always repair to Venezuela or Nicaragua though they would have to bring their own bathroom tissue and tins of bully beef.
East Germany’s economic transition might have featured fewer dislocations if the two segments of Germany had retained separate currencies.
Persistent regional differences in income and employment levels are unremarkable in affluent and tend to be more pronounced in Europe than they are in North America. The eastern lander lag behind the rest of Germany by about 30%. Now compare Wales, Ulster, and the north of England to the remainder of the UK. The disjunction is pretty similar.
“affluent countries”
I visited Prague, Dresden and East Berlin in 1985 as part of a WW2 battlefield tour group. I interacted, to a point, with the natives but there was never any humor, bonhomie or even open curiosity about folks form someplace else.
I have pictures of “apartments” along the eastern side of the Wall that were apparently just hollow façades, and was later told it’s a good thing nobody was there to see me take them, or else I’d have had a different return path back to the States.
The snotfaced blob who penned that tripe has no idea. He would be better employed as a doorstop.
Full disclosure: my Mother’s parents somehow fled the Ukraine in the early 30’s, and eventually settled in Canada, where Ma was born. My grandparents spoke nothing of what they’d been through, and as a child I quickly picked up on that subject being Closed. My Mom likely heard some details, because while she has always been proud to be Ukrainian (not Russian, make no mistake), to this day she reacts with fear and horror to the idea of ever setting foot back there. I can only imagine what my grandparents went through, and no one has ever spoken of us having relatives remaining alive over there…
So I grew up with a love for my heritage and a loathing of communism both in my DNA. In the 80’s I went to university in Texas. Ukrainian wasn’t offered there, but the Russian Department had an excellent reputation, and so I took three years of courses, and came to know some lovely people in the Department. For some reason, my instructors for all my classes were British or Aussie or Kiwi. It was the 80’s, and there was the Cold War still… As it was, the rudimentary, farmboy Ukrainian I’d picked up raised some eyebrows.
During my first year, the Department had an informal get together at the student union ( back in the day when instructors could have a beer with students without fear of destroying their career).
Afterwards, one of the third-years offered to continue things at the nearby Co-Op dorm where he lived, and so a handful of us trooped over, eager to further mangle Russian grammar and get to know each other.
Imagine my shock when we got to that dorm room, to find one wall entirely covered in an enormous red hammer-and-sickle Soviet flag. In Texas. In the 80’s. With our host, a proud, self-identifying pro-soviet communist, ready to hold forth (and recruit?) a gaggle of beer-buzzed first year students. In my entire life it had never occurred to me that there could be someone so simple that they would embrace communism without a gun pointed at them. I couldn’t have been more astonished if he’d turned out to have been a unicorn who pooped glitter-crusted strawberry macaroons.
How can such people exist?
Later, I was telling my first-year instructor, an Englishman, about that revelation; and he introduced me to the term “Tankie”. A Tankie is a British term, coined during the constant infighting among British communists, to describe pro-Soviet communists who rationalized the violent suppression of anti-Soviet uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. A Tankie sees sending in the tanks as a “gotta break some eggs to make the great socialist omelette” solution. A Tankie makes excuses for totalitarians.
I don’t recall being angry when I met my first Tankie. I was shocked, and I recall feeling contempt for his
worldview— but I think I recognized that soon enough, LARPer that he was, he’d be mugged by reality.
Sadly, these days my alma mater is littered with Tankies, illiterate fools who know nothing of the inhumanity inherent in communism and Do. Not. Care. Like this ‘Jacobin’ Tankie who sees the Soviet Union through the ‘misty, water-colored memories of the way we were’. He’s selling a grotesque fantasy. ‘What’s too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget’** indeed.
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** I make no apology for using lines from “The Way We Were”. Probably the first time in years something Barbra Streisand said made political sense, so I’m doing that harridan a favor here.
Thanks Clinton, great post. It makes you think …
On East Germany, P.J. O’Rourke said that communism had succeeded in doing what no other system in history could: it make Germans inefficient. I wouldn’t be stunned if it took a couple of generations to fix the damage that was done.
Pinky:
In one of Robert Kaplan’s books (I believe it was “Balkan Ghosts”), he interviewed a Western entrepreneur establishing a branch in Romania, who vowed he would never hire anybody who grew up under Communism, because they exhibited no work ethic. He would only hire the younger kids who finished school after 1989.
The eastern sector of Germany once held two of its most powerful Protestant states: the Duchy of Saxony and the Margravate of Brandenburg. The later evolved in the Kingdom of Prussia and a center of German industry, science, and military power. It deserved a comeuppance for its support of the Reich, but it’s sad to see what was once an asset become a burden to a modern and democratic Germany.