East German history

“Walter Ulbricht, sidelined on the pretext he was two old”

That’s ironic given how proverbially gerontocratic the Soviet leadership was, a feature now inherited by the US.

“we’re going backwards on the dimension of freedom with regression on democracy, rights to protest, human rights and a dramatic increase in state surveillance of the population, made possible by the internet.”

It has been argued that the level of surveillance (both private and governmental) we nowadays accept as a matter of routine would have put the Stasi surveillance state to shame. This is a bit misleading as a comparison but it is definitely true that the technical capabilities of surveillance and the sheer columes of data collected by different actors today far surpass whatever the Stasi was able to do.

This reviewer lists a number of what he thinks are historic errors or omissions:
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/ddr-geschichte-sed-egon-krenz-brd-katja-hoyer-rezension-1.5834330

Similar and more detailed, from a historian:
https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/politische-buecher/katja-hoyers-versuch-einer-anderen-geschichte-der-ddr-scheitert-18991650.html

Yet another historian with relevant expertise:
https://www.sehepunkte.de/2023/07/38095.html

An interesting article that is less polemical and less focused on Hoyer’s book but in my view explains well the context of the debate:
https://taz.de/Debatte-um-DDR-Geschichte/!5935607/

(I trust that everybody knows how to get the texts translated if necessary.)

I fear the melancholic appraisal of the UK’s trajectory over the last 30 years ignores the lived experience of a smaller and less discursive section of the population who have made off like bandits.

A couple of anecdotes here that may be relevant. I went through East Berlin going to Prague in about 1980 (I don’t remember the exact date). A few things that struck me:
1. Some younger people were quite willing to talk to you fairly openly on the street (in perfectly good English). The thing that most irked them was not being able to travel freely.
2. The thing that I really was not available were fresh fruit and vegetables, even though I was there in summer. But I walked around the streets and saw people parking their Trabis and talking boxes of fruit and vegetables out of the boots. I’m not sure whether there was a black market or whether they grew them on allotments.
3. I had to take the S-Bahn to get to the Ostbahnhof where the train to Prague left from. They insisted I have the correct change (which I didn’t have) and were inflexible about it. So I just travelled “schwarz”. Nothing happened. It aligned with a general feeling that rather than being a police start, East Germany was rather anarchistic.
4. There were some modern buildings with rather ugly architecture to be seen, but in many buildings there was no sign of any repairs or renovations having been made since the end of the war. There were still bullet holes to be seen on the facades of many buildings.
5. Near Alexanderplatz, I saw a free street concert. The support act was a Police cover band and the main act had original light rock songs and was pretty good. The crowd was fairly large but reserved, mostly long haired youth.
6. When I took the train to Prague most people got off at the first stop beyond the border, and I didn’t know why. I found out later why. They were changing money, because when you got to Prague all the banks were closed and without cash you couldn’t buy anything or get into a hotel. I had to bribe people to get to a hotel that would take US dollar travellers cheque. First lesson, there are ways to do things, but you have to know them.

for women to participate in the workforce to a degree that West Germany could not achieve

Chose not to achieve.

The book is still in my TBR, and her twitter feed often annoys me for reasons I find difficult to articulate, but Ted’s and Tm’s comments get to at least parts of it. Not mentioning racism and the appeal of the far right in eastern Germany is quite an achievement. It pairs with “things weren’t all bad” which slides easily into apologetics, and I worry that apologetics are where the book is going to wind up.

The first paragraphs from the review Tm cites from sehepunkte.de is a banger. (I don’t know anything about the reviewer, and have just a general sense that the Institute for Contemporary History is a solid, middle-of-the-road institution.) My rough translation:

Katja Hoyer assumes that the history of the GDR, following its defeat on German soil, was written by the victors with the goal of devaluing East Germany. The GDR, she claims, is “presented as a gray, uniform, bleary stain” and disposed of “sweepingly as a footnote in German history.” (20) Hoyer attributes this position — just as sweepingly and undifferentiatedly — to a “western perception.” (20) That the history of the GDR was in no way written exclusively by West German historians but also by East German historians, and that there were controversies involved — none of that counts because she wants to rewrite what she calls victors’ history.

Strawmanning, basically; with a side order of exaggerating her book’s originality. The second worries me less, especially if it’s a matter of writing for a popular audience and academics getting sniffy. It would worry me even less with a woman author swimming against the very strong currents of sexism in German academia. But setting the whole exercise against a strawman it likely to lead to big problems of interpretation. Just because the GDR allowed right turns at red lights does not mean it was a better way of life.

Anyway, a not insignificant addition to the economic discussion above is that West Germany spent about 3.5 billion marks buying the freedom of political prisoners over 25 years, and a sum that I can’t quickly find on fees for roughly 250,000 people who had officially applied to leave the GDR.

I’ll probably read the book soonish, but I have misgivings.

Thanks for the counterpoint, Chris.

The TAZ article is better than I expected, with this as the core:

The success [of Hoyer’s and another book] points to an empty space [nice pun in the original on “Lehrstelle,” university teaching position] in East discourse. There has not yet been a success in closing the gap between individual life experiences and the frame that the dictatorship created. The generally banal observation, that there were also private happiness and private success stories in the GDR, is compulsively connected with a large “But” by the official remembrance work and research: There was universal childcare and economic independence for women? Yes, but that was only done because the SED state needed women as workers.

Living space was cheap? Yes, but there were shortages of dwellings and the older housing stock was falling apart. The problem with that: That’s not how private remembering works. People remember the positive, selectively, for a simple reason: People don’t like to see large parts of their lives judged by others because it was spent in a dictatorship. Someone whose first love was in an FDJ summertime camp doesn’t care that the FDJ was a de facto state organization with forced membership.

Furthermore, recollections are self-evidently varying. Someone who ruined their health in a chemical company or was imprisoned by the Stasi has different memories of the GDR from someone who was politically accommodating or a true believer and spent a comfortable life in the party or state apparatus. Or as a representative of the so-called “technical intelligentsia,” an engineer for example, who could keep politics as much at a distance as possible, but who saw sense and validation in their work.

Writing a history that captures those aspects and dynamics isn’t easy.

The TAZ author makes good points about social mobility, something I think the GDR had in common with other East Bloc states.

In the middle of the essay, the author asks why the GDR was stable for about 30 years, why it didn’t have the kinds of uprisings that the other Central European states did. I don’t know if Hoyer’s book goes into this, but I strongly suspect the difference is the existence of another German state. There wasn’t another place for Walesa to be Polish; there wasn’t another Czechoslovakia for Dubcek. But after 1961, people that discontented with East Germany either put their energy into escaping, or if they put their energy into organizing the state first locked them up and then put them across the border. And when protest did come on a mass scale, very few opted for “build a better GDR.”

I notice that I gave the wrong link for the first TAZ article referenced in 3. The link I meant to give is https://taz.de/Buch-ueber-DDR-Geschichte/!5931542/.

The second TAZ article I think is more interesting in how it puts the debate in context.

For me, and I think for most of us on the left, a key question about the legacy of “actually formerly existing socialism” is the political consciousness it left behind. My sense is that political opinion in the East is substantially more conservative than the West: less interested in progressive reform, less universalist, less secular, etc. The Communist experience, even for following generations, seems to have left a bitter taste for almost everything we think of as progressive. That strikes me as an immense failure, since the promise of these societies was not just that current living standards would be improved, but that the groundwork would be laid for a much better future. It turned out to be the other way around.

“On living standards, it is worth remembering that the country was competing with the West during a period when Western societies were undergoing an amazing expansion in the amount and variety of consumer goods. Things look somewhat different today as the UK, France, Italy (to name but three) have been stuck at the same level for nearly two decades.”

— life expectancy for men in the DDR peaked right before unification, at 69.6 years. what’s the life expectancy for men today?

Italy 80.6
France 79.3
UK 78.7
Germany 78.5

apparently somehow our crappy modern democracies, in decline though they may be, are giving men a full extra decade of life more than the DDR did on its best day.

Doug M.

The thing that I really was not available were fresh fruit and vegetables, even though I was there in summer.

East German joke:

“How do you use a banana as a compass:

“Put the banana on the Berlin Wall. The side that gets eaten is east.”

I haven’t read TM’s links properly but it’s funny to see a book that was feted across the British mainstream press getting so comprehensively trashed.

Btw “reparatory plunder” seems like a reasonable term for what East Germany was subjected to following the Mauerfall.
https://mondediplo.com/2019/11/06germany

Chasing through the links, many of the rejections struck me as tediously unimaginative and entirely conformist imperialist history. For example, when someone posing as a true expert tells me Hoyer’s remarks on the Hallstein doctrine are wrong but just leaves it there, without any effort to explain how she got it wrong or cite even a meager handful of facts showing she was wrong, I am not impressed. Facts and arguments are the sharp edge of a hatchet job, but when you can’t even do that? It suggests your views are part of the mythology. By the way, I don’t share the complacent certainty that conformity to the conventional views so mystifyingly held by the authorities (however does that happen, such historians wonder? The will of The People?) is purely voluntary here and now but not there and then.

Similarly, the flat assertion that Stalin would never have accepted a neutral united Germany strikes me merely as piety. Chronology refutes any falsification that sees the formation of the BRD as reactions to Stalinism or Soviet imperialism. Yet, that is the fundamental premise of such dismissal. Soviets withdrew from Austria and Iran, so no, the assumption no neutral Germany could have negotiated needs support. The bland unspoken assumption that only continuity with the Second Reich and Weimar and (the good parts of) Third Reich (economy and society) could produce a real Germany needs some argument. Adenauer’s rejection is just as blunt a fact as the Wall. Somehow ignoring that he did reject it to put the onus on Stalin is egregious special pleading I think. And references to modern research, a la Wentker, aren’t enough. Citations may not convince me, but the absence of citations should convince no one.

The general notion that Hoyer’s popular history must rehearse at acceptable length a whole catalog of favorite crimes in order to be deemed acceptable doesn’t even make sense in a work correcting false views. First, once again, the real rebuttal to these claims lies in a brief selection of citations demonstrating Hoyers is tilting at a straw man, thus her selection is not a correction but a falsification. That is to say, reviewers should show how Ossis are not second-class and the DDR is not dismissed. This seems to be in defiance of common opinion and thus needs more demonstration to justify rejecting Hoyer in toto.

Second, a double standard is at work here: It simply is not, not, not the case that by common consent every popular work of history must detail at suitable length the failures, crimes and atrocities of the historian’s state, or be rejected as propaganda. Perhaps it should, though how this isn’t another kind of sensationalism is not clear to me? This is especially true when conventional wisdom and civic religion erect mythologies about villains as well as heroes. The implication no decent historian offends the devout readers is the very opposite of historical judgment in my opinion.

But that’s enough on the negative critique from the right. (Of the links the only leftish view is the Christian Bangel article, which is very narrow in focus, a personal testimony which appears to be honest, but isn’t a scientific survey. Data, not the end of the story. Double standards usually require such stringent quality control in selected cases after all, but I don’t reject Bangel.) The truth is, I’ve left the book unfinished lying in the bathroom and I haven’t been able to force myself back to it even given the usually desperate need to read on that occasion. Why not?

To put it briefly, because 1)her view is too much about justifying national unity 2)her view relies far too much on BS like the paranoia of collective entities 3)there is too thin, nearly nonexistent comparative analysis between the DDR and the BRD even, much less the capitalist world as a whole and 4)there is no viewpoint on historical context, before and after.

And to put it bluntly, 1)the DDR is basically decommunized (or destalinized if you insist) in roughly the same kind of sentimental way the BRD is denazified. Lurking in the background is, Let us all, Ossis and Wessis unite as Germany wages war against Russia and supports Israel. Her softness on the AFD, which is after all quite popular everywhere (at the moment) is I think part and parcel of her patriotic agenda. But I’m not a German or even an Anglo-German.

2)The complaints about Hoyer’s leniency against the SED leadership are nonsense. The notion that a group of people have a mind that an amateur can diagnose as paranoia, even when there really are enemies, is malignant twaddle. This is committed anticommunist analysis, seeing a whole group of people (many of whom were jailed by Nazis) as pathological. Perhaps the most ridiculous example is Hoyer’s ludicrous certainty that it was the state’s slandering of a Lutheran clergyman who set himself on fire as a nutjob and a right winger that provoked the widespread opposition. Perhaps I am unduly influence by the example of Christian clergymen in the US throughout my lifetime? But I firmly believe putting undue faith in the good faith of the clergy is for liars and fools. I’m afraid arguing with my life experience will be an uphill job. Thus, I see this as another example of someone arguing that it’s woke snobbery that is provoking Trumpery, except with a right wing twist to turn it back on the enemy.

3)When talking about the emigration from the east to the west in the late forties and fifties, Hoyer tacitly affirms there were no Nazis fleeing to safer ground. And I know 1953 is a whole eight years after the Third Reich, which Hoyer assumes is an entire generation so that apparently Nazism couldn’t possibly play even a lesser role in the events of June. Don’t agree. To me it seems inescapable to see her basic attitude as, Germany shouldn’t have paid such massive reparations thus the DDR was savagely persecuted and “we” today should forgive the abused people of Germany for impaired ways of dealing with this (i.e., the DDR’s socialism.) I don’t believe this is the same thing as rejection of collective punishment. Perhaps I haven’t gotten far enough, but the BRD’s involvement in foreign affairs is uncriticized. For that matter (unless I haven’t got to that part yet?) the DDR’s supplementary role along with the Cubans in helping defeat South African intervention in Angola (a defeat playing a role in the end of apartheid in my judgment) isn’t praised, despite the supposed apologetic intentions of Hoyer.

4)In the end I think Hoyer still holds to the preposterous notion that somehow democracy—meaning a free market system as Hoyer’s Free Democratic Party economist and politician husband presumably has it?—is the opposite of totalitarianism, the amalgam of Naziism and Communism. I think by avoiding explication of this, much less defense, of the long trend Hoyer avoids asking the question: Isn’t the rise of the AFD so strongly in the east and the west, the product of the defeat of socialism? Socialism is the opposite of fascism. It’s fascism and democracy that are the brothers (Cain and Abelish at times?) If one end of the seesaw, socialism, goes down, doesn’t the other end go up? The implicit notion that Erhard’s miracle isn’t just as ephemeral as Schacht’s miracle I think is false. And her book, which I think is pervaded by the feeling that FDP economics is just and true, lacks value in proportion.

After finishing “Beyond the Wall” I took the time to read the rather more turgid but informative “The Plans that Failed: An Economic History of the GDR.” Basically, given the nature of the demographics, the levels of destruction caused by the Second World War and the Soviets extraction of “reparations” in the form of the removal of the remaining industrial base of the east (along with 10% of the west as part of the quadripartite division of Germany, there was simply inadequate remaining infrastructure for the GDR to rebuild successfully. Coupled with later Soviet inability to prop the regime up with oil and other raw material, the failure was inevitable. Economic liberalization might have staved off collapse, but the reunification under the aegis of the West German economy and government was inevitable.

” Cold War Democrats, European right-wing social democrats and West German reviewers still find this subject so triggering.”

— I don’t know which group you’re slotting me into, but I respond strongly to it because (1) I’ve been living in former Communist countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia for most of this century, and (2) when I’m not, my home in Germany is literally a couple of kilometers from the old Grenze.

When we first bought our house, I could look up to the hillside and see the scar where the old fenceline / minefield ran. That scar has gradually faded… but when we drive to my in-laws house, just a few minutes away, my wife can point to the exact spot in the road where in 1979 an Ossi waved down a car. He had made it over the fences, but then stepped on a mine, and had his foot blown off. Nevertheless, he crawled another couple of kilometers through the forest, leaving a trail of blood from his shattered stump, until he reached that road.

“I think I made my position clear at the outset, both now and 17 years ago, that whatever good things there may have been about the DDR, they were morally overwhelmed by the lack of basic freedoms and the political repression.”

— Honestly, you really haven’t. You keep saying it, but then you keep going back and talking about the good things, and how millions of people had pretty okay lives, decent housing, good for women, they were trying so hard, and then gosh isn’t it /curious/ how people are /triggered/.

There are huge horrible aspects of the DDR that you consistently either minimize (the surveillance state) or simply ignore (the pervasive grime and trash in all non-official public spaces, the multiple ecological disasters) — despite these being aspects that were obvious to casual visitors, and also major reasons for the DDR’s very rapid and complete collapse of legitimacy.

I’ve been around long enough to remember your first posts about the DDR, way back when. And I remember reading them and thinking, dude, did we visit the same country?

Doug M.

Doug 18: The lfie expectancy gap between east and West was 3.2 years for men and 2.3 for women at the time of unification, which is substantial but, to be fair, less than the regional (or for that matter racial) variation for example in the US today.

Equalization between West and East is still incomplete but the progress has has been quite respectable. The women’s gap has disappeared, for men there still remains a gap of a bit more than a year, which widened during the pandemic but seems to have shrunk back. (https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Sterbefaelle-Lebenserwartung/sterbetafel.html and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_deutschen_Bundesl%C3%A4nder_nach_Lebenserwartung)

For life expectancy by region in the US: https://www.nationhoodlab.org/the-regional-geography-of-u-s-life-expectancy/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_life_expectancy.

stj 24: “Hoyer’s Free Democratic Party economist and politician husband” I think you are mixing her up. The author’s bio is here: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katja_Hoyer

“t I’ve never liked the style of blogging where one requires a ritual denunciation of everything bad about something as a condition of writing about it and takes a failure to mention X as “symptomatic”: the so-called “will you condemnathon”.”

— if I’m going to write a fair and balanced biography of Ernest Hemingway, then I probably need to at least briefly discuss that he was consistently horrible to the women in his life. If I somehow just altogether skip that, the reader may reasonably wonder what’s going on. That’s not a “condemnathon”. It’s wondering why this very obvious thing somehow isn’t even getting a mention.

— it’s not even the last on the list of Really Obvious Bad Things About The DDR! like, the DDR left a toxic political and cultural legacy that is still with us today! I live in Germany, and much of what’s bad and problematic in German politics comes straight from the East, whether it’s the illiberal Left (die Linke) or the illiberal Right (AfD). Poll after poll shows that Ossis are more pessimistic, less trusting, more Euroskeptic, more anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner, have less faith in institutions, are unhappier about their lives, and are far, far more racist.

My son did two years in university in the East. He left, partly because he changed majors, but partly because he just… didn’t like the East. It was Trump Country, basically, and he was getting tired of the endless weird conversations.

“ou chose not to reply to the points made. Can I therefore fairly conclude from your silence that you “minimize” or worse, deny,”

— Okay, so you want me to engage in public criticism of the government of Rwanda while I am [checks notes] living in Rwanda as literally an invited guest of the government of Rwanda, working directly every day with the government of Rwanda.

Feel free to claim the win when, somehow, I just don’t do that.

Doug M.

“Almost 60 per cent of residents in eastern Germany regard themselves as second-class citizens”
https://www.ft.com/content/6fe23e32-df90-11e9-9743-db5a370481bc

And given Doug’s comments about “Trump country” it’s not hard to understand why.

Poll after poll shows that Ossis are more pessimistic, less trusting, more Euroskeptic, more anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner, have less faith in institutions, are unhappier about their lives, and are far, far more racist.

You can lead a horse to Treuhand…
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014759672300094X

“If she were writing about the American South in the first two thirds of the 20th century — would she say, “Oh yeah, things were bad for Black people” or would she capture the centrality of Jim Crow in that society?”

— Bingo.

“Almost 60 per cent of residents in eastern Germany regard themselves as second-class citizens”

— on one hand, five of the six Eastern Laender are the five poorest states in Germany. that’s a real thing and it has to be part of any conversation about the East. (the sixth one is of course Berlin — but let’s note that nearly one in four Ossis lives in Berlin state, so it’s not exactly a weird outlier.)

otoh, the two richest non-Berlin Laender in the East have incomes fairly close to the two poorest Laender in the West. but while Saxony and Saarland may have per capita incomes that are within a few percent of each other, their political cultures are wildly different. Saarland is the last great bastion of the Social Democrats, while Saxony… yeah well, Saxony.

“Doug Muir’s a periodic resident of Bavaria; I’ve lived in Berlin for a dozen years now, and Munich for ten before that; we’re both more than interested outsiders.”

— people who actually live in or near former DDR have strong opinions about former DDR shock.

Doug M.

Not completely off-topic, Maria’s review here back at the end of 2023 inspired me to read Marzahn, Mon Amour. Marzahn is one of Berlin’s outer boroughs, home to high-rises built by the GDR to house its capital’s burgeoning population. Since reunification, considerable investment has been put into sprucing up and maintaining the district. The book is about an author whose career in literary fiction is faltering, so she takes up a new profession as a foot-care specialist. She recounts visits by various customers by way of creating a portrait of an eastern district that otherwise gets little love in the general culture.

Here, too, are questions of selection and balance that are key for Hoyer’s historical endeavor.

As I wrote elsewhere:

[Katja] Oskamp closes [the book] with observations about writing and care work, along with brief follow-ups on many of the people previously described. She writes that in the period the book covers, she had seen roughly 1900 people. Readers are left on their own to surmise how and why she chose to write about the people she did. One thing that struck me about her selection is that there’s practically nobody of non-German extraction. The only one I can recall is an unnamed Russian woman who commits suicide by jumping from a high-rise near the studio. …

Another aspect of her selection is that those years saw a surge of a million or more refugees into Germany, and she says that the share of refugees who live in the district is high. Yet the refugee story that she chooses to tell is that of Gerlinde Bonkat, who fled, along with her mother and brother, as a child from East Prussia in January 1945. Bonkat’s story is interesting, and affecting. The family were visibly practicing Christians in atheist East Germany; Bonkat’s mother tells her that she can forget about advanced education because of their beliefs. (Why didn’t the family head further west between 1945 and the construction of the Wall in 1961? Oskamp doesn’t say, she doesn’t indicate that she ever asked.) Nevertheless, Bonkat eventually gains training as a nurse, and she seems truly to have had a caring vocation. Oskamp describes her as something of a secularized nun, someone who had few material interests and was always interested in helping others. Of all the refugee stories that Oskamp could have chosen — and she only chooses one — why the one that says “Germans suffered because of the war too, you know”?

I’ve had Hoyer’s book on my reading list for a while but never gotten around to it, and must say the OP isn’t making me rush to prioritise it.

First – the notion that Stalin would, or could, have accepted a neutral united Germany, or that he was sincere in his outreach is simply laughable. It flies in the face of more or less all of Soviet foreign policy conduct under his rule (and also assumes he wouldn’t have simply tried to Sovietise a united ‘neutral’ Germany by other means). It is the kind of claim that once made, should invite scepticism of the rest of the text.

Second – Hoyer’s contention that the shortages of the 80s were essentially an anomaly due to the crisis of the 80s and not inherent to the system is simply wrong. The USSR and Warsaw Pact states did comparatively well in the 1970s because a) a huge rise in commodity prices made the Soviet coffers flush with cash for subsidies b) the Warsaw Pact states started borrowing money from the West and c) much of this cash was spent on buying things the Communist block couldn’t produce. As soon as commodity prices went down and the debts came due, the shelves went bare in East Berlin AND Moscow. The systemic nature of shortages was diagnosed by Janos Kornai as early as 1980 – in short, it was the relative prosperity of the 70s (emphasis on the relative) that was the anomaly.

Third – even if the East Germans HAD had a standard of living that Chris thinks they should have been willing to tolerate the proof of the pudding is in the eating. In East Germany’s case, the moment the borders were (accidentally) opened and people could leave, the country collapsed.

Finally – if one wants to seriously compare the anxieties and economic travails of living in the UK in 2024 with living in the DDR in the 1980s, a good place to start would be examining the suicide rate.

The life expectancy statistics I mentioned above and also income and other statistics show that there really was considerable convergence between East and West in terms of quality of living, and the East is objectively a lot better off than before the Wende. As is often the case, subjective perceptions don’t always match measurable reality. That whole complex has been a topic of much debate and contention. Fact is that many of those who declare themselves, for more or less justified reasons, to be dissatisfied with the new system, have decided to mainly if not exclusively blame foreigners for whatever they think is wrong. Socialist education hasn’t done much for their analysis of capitalism alas. As an example, the AFD, which will probably become the leading party in the next state elections in the East, demands abolishing the inheritance tax, opposes wealth taxes, and so on. In a word, a party of working class economic populism.

Calling the Left Party, which resulted from the fusion of the post-SED party PDS and another left party, a force of illiberalism is not accurate, certainly not at the federal level, where it mostly has been a necessary voice of the genuine left (what’s left of it). The Wagenknecht faction has always been awful but she hasn’t been in charge. Wagenknecht has recently made a full right turn and when her party wouldn’t follow her, she decided she’d rather destroy it. Naming her new party after herself is a rather revealing move. Apparently her fans like the idea. Will be interesting how this turns out. Wagenknecht does retain a remnant of economic populism but she does her best to not let it dominate her main political message, which is ordinary right wing culture war plus Putin veneration.

Hi Doug Muir @36, if you’re saying what I think you are saying – that you can’t write honestly about Rwanda while you’re there, for reasons of personal safety or perhaps for employment reasons, I think we can all understand that.

It may be best for the sake of the blog’s integrity that if you can’t write about the place you’re living in a way that those of us in less autocratic states can write about where we live, that you carefully consider how or even if you can ethically write about Rwanda while you are there. John Holbo had to figure this out in relation to Singapore, so you won’t be the first blogger here to deal with this issue.

For the thread that’s in it, we can all remember paeans to East Germany’s living standards and freedoms from invited visitors well into the 1980s!

FWIW I did a short project in the country about a decade ago and the rosy picture you painted did not chime with my, albeit brief, impressions.

Doug Muir 36:
“Poll after poll shows that Ossis are more pessimistic, less trusting, more Euroskeptic, more anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner, have less faith in institutions, are unhappier about their lives, and are far, far more racist.”

I would suggest that perhaps they’re just refusing to wear the smiley conformist mask that most western people wear all their lives. But I could be wrong, of course.

The district’s wealth level is not really helping people that got a GDR background when the income recipient moved there from the west or somewhere else.
An East German background did not help peoples careers, including those within the east at the top end and even less so the level of accumulated capital.

“So, no, I’m not wildly pleased about the personalization and the aggression.”

It’s not aggression. It’s impatience and, yes, irritation.

Your interest in the DDR stems from… what, two weeks you spent there forty years ago? Which is fine! It’s good to have interests. And you don’t have to live in a place to be interested in its history.

But other-Doug and I do live in or near the former DDR, so its legacy affects us directly in a way that it doesn’t affect you. Like, my small town has a refugee center, and the AfD organized a protest of it. Our little Bavarian Stadt didn’t have enough AfD supporters, though, so to make it work, they bussed in some protestors from… the former DDR, just a few miles away.

Further: I’ve been dealing personally and professionally with the legacy of Communism for most of the last 25 years. In 2008, in post-Communist Armenia, I put my wife and small children on an airplane out of the capital at 5 AM; at 10 AM, the Army started shooting protesters in the street. In 2015, in post-Communist Tajikistan, we had to shelter in place for a day when there was an abortive coup that turned into a bloody purge, with a running gun battle on the airport road a few minutes from our house. In Moldova in 2018, I nearly lost my job because my work had annoyed a local oligarch. That oligarch had gotten his start, back in the 1980s, as a low-level KGB man running the surveillance cameras in the local Intourist hotel; when the USSR fell, he made his first million using sex tapes to blackmail local politicians and businessmen.

I don’t mention these anecdotes to score points. Once you choose a career as a development worker, stuff like this is going to happen sometimes. And I know many people whose experiences have been far, far more alarming. I mention this stuff to make the point that, for many years, “what is the legacy of Communism” has been a much more immediate question for me and my family than it probably has been for you or yours. It’s something that has impacted our lives very directly. I can draw a direct line from the Communist surveillance state of the late 1980s to some very unpleasant experiences that I had 30 years later: it was literally the same dude.

— Does this make me a frothing knee-jerk anti-Communist? I don’t think so? I’m interested in that history, and I’m perfectly happy to discuss the various positive aspects of those regimes. The USSR was progressive in a bunch of ways, crushed Hitler, put the first man in space, and had really good basic public health! Communist Yugoslavia was actually damn interesting, and might have survived if Tito hadn’t screwed up the 1968 Constitution! Communism in Hungary finally got rid of the rapacious, extractive, and reactionary nobility that had plagued the country for the last 500 years!

So if you want to say “the DDR had pretty good housing and health care, actually” — well, I don’t actually think that’s correct, but it’s a conversation I’m perfectly happy to have; see my comment on life expectancy, above. And a conversation about exactly why the DDR fell — lack of freedom (if so, which ones)? stifled expectations? desire for consumer goods? pan-German nationalism? — could be endlessly interesting.

But if the starting point is “other than the bad stuff — which I absolutely acknowledge but don’t really want to discuss in detail — there was much to like”, then yeah, hackles may rise. From where I sit, the bad stuff was unavoidable and central.

Doug M.

wacko: “perhaps they’re just refusing to wear the smiley conformist mask that most western people wear all their lives. But I could be wrong, of course.”

You could indeed go wrong, but conformism is in the eye of the beholder isn’t it? Ask any follower of a cultlike authoritarian movement and they’ll tell you how nonconformist they are. The real conformists are those of us who reject their fake populist conspiracy narratives – we are sheep who believe everything that the “Lügenpresse”, the lying press, is telling us. The millions who in recent weeks have taken to the street to defend democracy and human rights against right wing extremism – possibly the biggest mass protest in German history by number of participants (https://taz.de/Demos-gegen-rechts-im-Maerz/!6002586/) – are, if you believe the AFD, following government orders (“bestellte Massen”).

It is instructive to look back to the period immediately after the fall of the SED regime in 1989, when a window of opportunity opened. The Bürgerrechtler, the civil rights activists who were instrumental in bringing down the regime, founded new political parties. They mostly wanted the GDR to remain independent and to develop some sort of democratic socialism based on the experiences that had been made. The first and last election was held in March 1990 and was won by the CDU with 41% (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkskammerwahl_1990). The CDU was a so-called “block party”. Although the regime was functionally a one party state, it allowed the existence of a Christian, a liberal and a nationalist party with names similar to the parties of Western bourgeois democracy. These parties simply had to agree to whatever the SED proposed – calling the conformist would be an understatement – but they were formally separate. After the Wende, the West German CDU shamelessly fused with the SED regime party CDU and used it as its power base.

Voters now for the first time had a choice – and they voted for the same old. The SPD, which was not tainted by SED collaboration, got 22%, the SED successor party PDS 17%. The new parties of the civil rights movement, led by courageous if often politically naive idealists who had brought about a successful nonviolent revolution with millions on the streets: became irrelevant immediately. The next thing happening was that the new government and parliament under the leadership of these opportunist fake Democrats dissolved its own state – and the window of opportunity was closed for good.

What happened isn’t hard to explain, people followed the money. But they did have a choice and what they got is exactly what they voted for, the dissolution of their own independent state in favor of a new regime of West-dominated bourgeois capitalism.

Chris @50

I’ve got the same page up and not entirely sure why you don’t think its a metric worth considering. In any case for those not doing their own research the suicide rates for the UK is 6.9 per 100,000, which seems pretty standard for Europe.

A more interesting contrast might be with the US, where suicide rates have been spiking due to socioeconomic factors, and are already elevated due to the ease of access to firearms. Wikipedia gives me a figure of 14.5 per 100,000. By contrast estimates for the GDR were in the 30 per 100,000 range, or more than double. To my mind, this should tell us something about the general failure of the East German political and economic regime to provide its citizens with a tolerable standard of living, at least by their own estimation rather than yours.

And this goes back to the point about whether it was the 70s or the 80s that was the anomaly. Hoyer mistakenly thinks it was the 80s period of shortage and malaise that was the aberration, whereas most economists and historians of the Soviet block think that the 70s were the odd decade out for the simple reason that the Communist states had an excess of cash (due to high commodity prices and Western credits) that they used to buy things, and that this was never a sustainable economic course.

I’d be interested to hear your take on that given that the implication of it – that whatever modest and time limited successes in socio-economic policy the GDR could claim, it was a doomed enterprise from the start and the Ossis were historically lucky to have a more successful FRG to absorb them and limit the fallout – would seem to demolish the basic thesis of Hoyer’s book.

I don’t see why not.

Among other things it seems like bad news for an American professor publishing a book about justice in 1971 that didn’t mention racial injustice or imperialism who was a white ex-airforce pilot and the son of a wealthy lawyer.

I’m getting a whiff of right-deviationism in this thread.

Ted@65 There’s no connection between the BRD’s attacks on third party diplomatic relations with the DDR and third party economic relations with the DDR? I’m trying to imagine the amount of trade undertaken by firms in third party foreign countries whose home governments have no diplomatic relations with the DDR, and I’m not visualizing much. Of course I’m no expert either on international trade even in general, much less in German history. That’s why an actual example or two is so much more serious than a flat denial.

It’s not clear whether you’re joining the general chorus that Hoyer isn’t acceptable becuase she’s not anticommunist enough (leaving the definition of “enough” to the ghostly judgment of John Foster Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover and Joes McCarthy sitting en banc?) I hope not because I think that’s a ridiculous criticism, made out of ideological commitment (that’s the charitable reading I think.)

As to the legacy of communism somehow being the AfD—the unspoken claim but essential to the argument nonetheless—the AfD in my opinion is one incarnation of the anti-communist values, part of the victors’ ethos. Regardless of what else has been said, one thing discrediting socialism is, socialists lost. Losers are not respected and not influential and do not set the tone. The AfD is not a dreadful hangover of the SED, is not a sentimental attachment to the DDR. In the comments it would seem the AfD is purely a moral disease of Ossis, when it simply is not. It is a Germany wide phenomenon. The only connection between AfD and the DDR is the open contempt for the people in the east so freely displayed in the comments. I think one of the things Chris Bertram finds appealing about this is that Hoyer’s book served to him as a corrective to this. But of course he will have to speak for himself and he may disagree sharply.

“Aren’t your anecdotes actually the legacy of anti-communism? Of perestroika and demokratizatsiya? I bet that’s how most of the locals see it.”

I bet you’d be wrong. i.e., Tajikistan never saw much perestroika, never mind democratization. the President for the last 30+ years is a former Communist Party member who literally used to be the boss of a collective farm.

“anti-communism”? ffs.

Doug M.

70: “In the comments it would seem the AfD is purely a moral disease of Ossis, when it simply is not. It is a Germany wide phenomenon. The only connection between AfD and the DDR is the open contempt for the people in the east so freely displayed in the comments.”

Yeah, no.

Overall, for the federal elections in 2021, the AfD got 8.2% of the vote in the western states, and 18.9% in the eastern states.

AfD outpolled the CDU in four out of five fully eastern states: 18.1 to 15.3 in Brandenburg, 18.0 to 17.4 in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 24.6 to 17.2 in Saxony, and 24.0 to 16.9 in Thuringia. Among eastern states, only in Sachsen-Anhalt did the CDU have a bigger share of the party vote than AfD, 21.0 to 19.6.

Berlin voted more like a western state in this regard, 9.4% for AfD and 17.2% for the CDU.

AfD’s highest share in a western state was 10.0% in Saarland, followed by 9.6 in Baden-Württemburg, 9.2 in Rheinland-Pfalz, and 9.0 in Bavaria. Their lowest share in any state was 5.0% in Hamburg.

In 2021, citizens in the eastern states voted for the AfD at more than twice the rate of their fellow citizens in the western states. Yes, the party has voters across Germany. No, they are not equally distributed.

https://www.tagesschau.de/wahl/archiv/2021-09-26-BT-DE/ergebnisse-bundeslaender.shtml

” In the comments it would seem the AfD is purely a moral disease of Ossis, when it simply is not. It is a Germany wide phenomenon. ”

— it’s a Germany wide phenomenon that started in the East, and remains much stronger in the East. Four of the five non-Berlin former DDR Laender have large (20% to 30%) AfD components in their state legislatures; only one of the ten western Laender is comparable (Hesse, with about 18%).

You seem to be saying “math is hard” so here’s a very simple example: in the former West Berlin, the AfD got 8% of the vote last election. In the former East Berlin, they got 22%.

I mentioned I live right on the old border, yes? Last election, I could literally walk one town over and see a dramatic difference in political posters. The AfD barely bothered to campaign in our little Bavarian town. (The local party leader is the town’s one taxi driver, who joined after his wife left him.) But next door in Thuringia, a few minutes on a bicycle, their flyers and slogans and posters were everywhere.

Doug M.

“8.2% is nothing and 18.9% is the majority.”

Not what I said at any point.

Apparently it is the former DDR’s majority (except really minority) party that is causing the mistreatment of immigrants is because the former DDR runs the country? And there is no more any AfD of importance in the west than there was a NPD or NSU?And there are no more conservative politicians in perfectly admirable other parties in Germany than there are lunatic authoritarians (or worse) in, say, the Republican party in the US? All we have to look at is the voting percentages of one singular party? (For the irony impaired, the answer in every question is, no.)

We want to double down on the math? That includes geometry. Yes, percentages are statistics too, but no analysis that doesn’t consider confounders is complete.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-Germany-with-districts-included-in-the-analysis-colored-according-to-their-mean_fig1_349236626

https://ryouready.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/germany_by_unemployment.png

It is not so clear that the slogan Death to the Stalinist peoples! is adequate.

Without knowing the differences between east and west Berlin, I cannot assume the higher percentage of AfD votes is due to the personal vileness of Ossis. As for the different number of flyers and posters in different electoral districts, it is not at all clear the two should be the same. It seems a better conjecture that more money is being put into the AfD campaign in the heathen lands a bicycle ride away, but whose money is it? Could the AfD get more support to provide an alternative to, say, perhaps die Linke in particular or against Ostalgie in general?

Nonetheless it is quite clear the overwhelming sentiment is rejection of the quasitotalitarian apologetics of the fraud Katja Hoyer. Perhaps it would have been better if she had absorbed some wisdom from an FDP politician husband? (Joke.)

Interesting discussion about the distribution of AfD votes. Does the east vote more AfD than expected when correcting for socio-economic factors, levels of education, and age? I haven’t, of course, done a study on this, but my gut feeling is ‘no’.

I lived in the east for two years, and although that is now about 15 years ago, I doubt that the structural issues caused by the Kohl government have in the meantime disappeared. (I.e., to basically shutter the eastern German economy by letting the Treuhand sell companies off for a symbolic sum to their western competitors who often immediately asset-stripped them. As opposed to keeping them intact, making them slowly more competitive before exposing them to a free market, thus minimising social and economic damage. But well, the voters at the time wanted a reunification as quickly as possible, without such transition, and they got what they wanted, hard.)

Here in Australia we recently had the indigenous voice referendum, and I am proud to live in the only territory that voted majority yes. In the days after the referendum, I saw newspaper pieces arguing that the territory wasn’t unusual in its voting decision once you correct for level of education and age of the population. To which my answer was, yes, duh, obviously? The people here are exactly why I love living here. Conversely, if you live in an area from which most well-educated, young people have to move away because there aren’t the kinds of jobs they want, that leaves an over-representation of uninformed, old people, and, well… that doesn’t make the population born there any more evil or ‘damaged’ by a communist past, it simply means that voting patters are predictably influenced by certain population statistics.

The other factor is that people are more likely to be anti-immigration the fewer immigrants are living in their area, because (with obvious exceptions) most people tend not to hate their neighbours but those other immigrants, the bad ones, the ones that the newspaper told them will come and steal all of the things. And many rural eastern areas have very few immigrants.

hix 79: Valid points. The AFD also gets a lot of financial and other support from rich people in Switzerland. The Swiss right wing party SVP is about as extreme as the AFD, also has good contacts with Nazis, is ideologically very similar (including support for Putin). Among the powerful media networks supporting the AFD are as mentioned the German Springer press (comparable to the Murdoch empire) but also, you might not have guessed that, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, once a very respected serious newspaper. Its German edition is like Prawda for the AFD. These Swiss players certainly haven’t suffered or benefited from socialist indoctrination.

Another important observation is that while right wing extremism has been far more of an issue in Eastern Germany (and you can ask antifascists on the ground about this), the development in the last few years has been a radicalization of the entire „right of center“ political landscape to the extent that CDU, Freie Wähler, and even the FDP are in many respects hardly distinguishable from the AFD any more. I wouldn’t have thought so a few years ago but I have come to think that Germany is more at risk of actually turning fascist in the next election than the US.

PS Another media supporter of the AFD is Musk. https://www.fr.de/politik/elon-musk-afd-hoecke-klage-x-rechtsextremismus-beatrix-von-storch-martin-sellner-zr-92994832.html

Rawls was literally a military officer (albeit briefly), never mind his wealthy upbringing and privileged life at Harvard. I don’t see how that makes him less partial than Hoyer. I’m guessing the unspoken assumption is that there’s a special moral taint that attaches to establishment members of the DDR and not (Jim Crow/1950s household) US but using that claim to disallow positive perspectives on the DDR seems transparently circular.

Doug@80 In the context of the discussion, the clear import of your numbers is 1)the minority vote for AfD requires conclusions about the whole population of the east which somehow implicates the previous DDR and 2)the lower minority vote for AfD justifies no conclusions about similar judgments on westerners and endorses the BRD. The numbers you cite do not justify this.

But it’s true, omitting your cited percentages and putting quotation marks around “nothing” and “majority” as if you wrote them does falsify your position. Ditto for the quotation marks around Death to the Stalinist Peoples!

Hate to repeat myself but the study I linked in 38 provides a useful alternative perspective to the “deplorable Jammerossis hate us for our freedom” analysis that’s getting so much airtime here.

Rawls was literally a military officer (albeit briefly)

Nope. He was an infantryman who was briefly a sargent (which is not an officer) and was demoted back to private when he wouldn’t discipline a solidier who he thought deserved no punishment. It is worth thinking about how one’s experiences influence one’s writings, but it helps to get things right at the start. Otherwise, the comparison you’re drawing here is…odd…not what I’d hoped to consider, and not really responsive to what I or others have written. The point is, I think, transparent to anyone who bothers to consider it (and who has the first idea of what Rawls says), so I won’t bother to belabour it.

Apologies for the errors and thanks for the context about the end of Rawls’s service as a non-commissioned officer.

Some context from Hoyer on her father: “an NVA officer who was dissatisfied with his country and was put in solitary confinement for several days because of a stupid joke, a drastic experience for him.”
https://www.katjahoyer.uk/p/interview-doing-german-history-in

Daragh @ 101

On German neutralisation, others in the thread have argued that the examples of Finland and Austria show that this was a viable option. The most charitable thing I can say about that is that if you ignore the recent historical context, psychological factors, population size, industrial potential and geography, then yes they present comparable models for neutrality, but that to do so would be obviously silly which is my very few historians make that argument, and the ones that do are regarded as cranks.

It has not been demonstrated that to use the actual historical evidence (around the Soviets being honest with the enforced neutrality of two prominent former Axis combatants) is at all ‘obviously silly’, and is quite the strange remark to make – except possibly by cranks.

“You claimed in the OP that you felt the living standards of the average DDR citizen were tolerable – I would argue the high suicide rate is a strong indicator that a large section of average DDR citizens disagreed, and did so very strongly”

The op also mentions a lack of freedom. Both based on personal experience and studies, let me ensure you that a decent level of material wellbeing that comes under the condition of clueless idiots, be it welfare bureaucrats or parents getting the right to command you around, has only a very limited positive effect against depression.

Made the mistake to cross read the articles about the high suicide rates in the DDR. No surprise, there has been quite a bit of research and some level of controversy. But sure enough, that it was not all just the DDR dictatorship, much less the material constraints, looks undisputed. To put insult to injury, suicide rates have even been linked to the progressive aspects of the GDR – high employment and divorce rates, not just military service or lack of a chance to opt out. Suicide rates were already rather high in some populous East German regions before 1945. The (most of the DDRs existence secret) suicide statistics are also considered rather honest. And then again, much about this is on some levels beside the point regarding the original question of how unhappy people were with the GDR. For example, GDR prisons at some point turned into places with relatively low suicide rates …. due to good anti suicide surveillance, but contrary believes would long circulate because the GDR just kept all numbers under lock, even the ones that would contradict critical narratives.

There’s even a 300-page creative commons license book about it….: (links all in German mostly from the first google search result page)
Creative commons book:
file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/Full-text-book-Driesch-Unter-Verschluss.pdf

Longer overview article:
https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/suizide-in-der-ddr-100.html

And the controversy part:
https://www.bpb.de/themen/deutschlandarchiv/326356/suizide-bei-den-grenztruppen-der-ddr-eine-replik-auf-udo-grashoff/
https://www.bpb.de/themen/deutschlandarchiv/326355/kritik-und-replik-suizide-bei-den-grenztruppen-und-im-wehrdienst-der-ddr/
(Sorry for 3 in a row, probably better to just publish that one)

engels and others: Hoyer being the daughter of relatively privileged system insiders is one thing. Another thing is that she uses her own parents as one of the case studies in her book to exemplify ordinary GDR people’s lives and attitudes. Add to this that none of her case studies highlight system critics. That is what several reviewers found objectionable. I don’t think anybody argues that a daughter of a system insider can’t write a book about the system’s history but some critical reflexion about her own family’s position was in order (and that would similarly apply to authors in the West – there is after all a lot of critical debate about history being written mostly by white upper class men).

Regarding acceptance of gays (Daragh 75, stj 77): The guy on the left in the cartoon is more likely voting for Wagenknecht than AFD.

stj: “The DDR decriminalized homosexuality in 1968 but gets no credit. The BRD abolished the infamous (should be, at least) Paragraph 175 in 1994 but gets credit.”

Fwiw, here’s the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, a semi-official educational resource:
“Hinsichtlich der Rechte für Homosexuelle war die DDR fortschrittlicher als die Bundesrepublik. Doch in der Öffentlichkeit wurden sie kriminalisiert. Die Staatssicherheit überwachte die schwul-lesbische Szene noch in den 1980er Jahren.”
Acknowledging that the GDR was more progressive wrt gay rights but that repression and surveillance of gays continued despite official decriminalization.
https://www.bpb.de/themen/deutschlandarchiv/265466/schwule-und-lesben-in-der-ddr/

The AFD and gay rights is a curious story. One of their leaders, Alice Weidel, has for decades been in a relationship with a Swiss woman with Sri Lankan migration background. She even while campaigning in 2017 shared a primary residence in Switzerland with her, in Bienne, a left-leaning, very multicultural town, curious how this works for a top candidate of a nationalist “Germany-first” party. I honestly don’t know what to make of this. The AFD officially opposed the marriage equality law of 2017 and proposed to have it repealed in 2018 (it’s not clear whether Weidel took part in the parliamentary vote but in 2023 she said she’s married to her partner, but she isn’t queer; https://www.fr.de/politik/extremisten-kanzler-deiss-weidel-ard-sommerinterview-afd-hoecke-queer-92511655.html). The AFD platform calls for abolishing anti-discrimination laws and abandoning anti-homophobic education efforts. (https://www.fr.de/politik/sexismus-afd-chrupalla-weidel-traditionelle-frau-familienbild-homophobie-homosexualitaet-zr-92817661.html)

Tm@110 addresses me directly to confirm via link the DDR should get no credit for decriminalization in 1968 and avoids mentioning anything about the BRD (much less historical comparisons to other countries.)

It’s not clear why this is necessary: Everyone else including Tm agrees Hoyer lacks the requisite anti-Communist commitment. The contrary thesis offered in the OP has I think been suitably modified to, Hoyer’s book is more or less an option for some nuance, if you’re so inclined provided you have the proper overall perspective. Tm also attacks Wagenknecht, the most famous German left known abroad as homophobic and manages to attack AfD in the person of Alice Weidel from the right as hypocrites. I’m not sure if Tm is implying a charge that as a perceived Marxist/Stalinist/totalitarian/fascist/terrorist sympathizer is also homophobic or those parts were somehow unrelated?

Strictly speaking, EWI’s rear guard action against Daragh McDowell’s betrayal at Yalta revival of the Cold War is correct, well meaning and futile. Stalin did not have a strong track record of breaking agreements. The precedent for central Europe was set in Italy just as Gabriel Kolko pointed out decades ago (in The Limits of War if I recall correctly.) That will not stop the McDowells I think from simultaneously condemning Stalin’s scrupulous adherence to treaties (famously the Nonaggression Pact) as purely duplicitous, as well as evil.

The notion that the Christian Democrats are leftist because they are for the war against Russia is in my opinion fatuous. The Finnish joined the war against Russia and brought the Finns Party into government as part of that turn. The Finns Party is very much so far as I can tell another part of the worldwide lurch to the right, and would in different geopolitical circumstances be deemed of the same genus as AfD. (Bombing Nordstream II didn’t hurt Finland etc. etc. etc.)

there is after all a lot of critical debate about history being written mostly by white upper class men

If only Hoyer had called her book “The DDR: A Herstory”…

Fine, call it vignettes instead of case studies.

Engels 114, Hoyer isn’t the only one who gets criticized for allegedly writing biased history. You insist on claiming that nobody before has ever been subject to that kind of criticism and that is just silly.

I should clarify that the wording “system insiders” for Hoyer‘s parents is my own and not quoted from the reviews, and it’s probably unjustified and misleading. They were afaict not anywhere close to those in power. I take that back.

Having read a bit of the book, it’s very good and deserves a better discussion than this thread (I include myself in that).

You insist on claiming that nobody before has ever been subject to that kind of criticism and that is just silly.

Far from insisting on that I don’t think I’ve even said it once.

Tm@117 ignores my question about whether the other comments not specifically directed to me personally were nevertheless meant to be associated in some fashion. Instead TM asks me what I would call Alice Weidel. The answer is, left to myself, nothing. I don’t know anything about her, since I don’t rely on Tm to report the facts, if there are any as opposed to innuendo and rumor.

But I still think the only reason for ever wondering about Alice Weidel outside Germany is to queerbait fascists. In any case, the AfD are not the only ones in Germany and I for one think the fascists in the police and army and intelligence services are much more dangerous, especially since they have contacts in the US. Ernst Roehm was a fascist too. All these examples really work to prove is that class really is more important in the end.

Apologies for assuming you’re not a long-term benefit claimant, Daragh.

This is illustrating my last point well:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/east-german-domestic-surveillance-went-far-beyond-the-stasi-a-1042883.html

stj 122: “whether the other comments not specifically directed to me personally were nevertheless meant to be associated in some fashion” No.

In Germany, as you probably know or can guess, politicians running for office are not supposed to have their primary residence abroad, and you are not supposed to have two primary residences. It’s a minor point but add to that that much of the AFD’s financial and other support comes from abroad (Switzerland and you-know-where), and the AFD claims that the other parties are not sufficiently Germany-oriented. Call that hypocrisy if you will. But the main issue I pointed out, as you well know, is that the AFD is a homophobic and immigrant-hating party. I know Weidel is not the first homosexual to support a fascist party.

Anyway I honestly don’t know what Weidel thinks she is doing in the AFD but she does her job, which is to spread hate against queers and immigrants and POC and leftist multiculturalists. That she for some time relaxed from that tough day job by attending leftist multiculturalist parties together with her lesbian POC progressive film-maker partner in a town abroad where her voters wouldn’t run into her is a special kind of irony. Ymmv.

the point of the spying wasn’t so much the spying itself as it was to destroy social trust and prevent the creation of the kind of horizontal bonds that underpin civil society and can challenge state power… Not only does this make mobilisation more difficult it induces a sense of loneliness, despair and hopelessness among regime opponents, which aren’t emotions conducive to political action (and, FWIW, aren’t irrelevant to the previous debate on suicide)

Well that sounds nothing like the UK.

engels @130

Well that sounds nothing like the UK.

No, it doesn’t, and no-one who has ever had even a whiff of living under such a system would seriously claim that it was.

@Engels

I also said suicide rates are a complex and multicausal phenomenon. For example, a person have a chronic, life limiting condition – a disability in other words – may be more prone to considering ending their life than someone who isn’t.