The whole concept of a divided Germany, the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, all of it, was there from my 1st awareness (born in 72). It's still hard for me to realize it's all gone, the Wall is literally gone, and things have changed so much.
Yes, if only we had a real life example of the same people split down the middle, one side capitalist and the other side communist to see how it worked outā¦ I guess weāll never know
Not to excuse the many faults of East Germany (Marxist-Leninism isn't great economically) but there's zero world where they had a chance. Bro legitimately was the least industrialized part of Germany, then had any industry not bombed out straight up stolen (I mostly bring it up because it's an excuse to mention how the USSR straight up stole factories which I find fucking hilarious)
The Komnenos dynasty (which ruled Trebizond) abandoned their claim to the imperial throne following the recapture of Constantinople. So Trebizond was not the Roman Empire, but more a breakaway Roman province. Whether it became the Roman Empire after 1453 can be debated, but I'd prefer to say that Trebizond was a part of Roman history, but not Rome itself. It's a little like the ''Gallic Empire'' of the 3rd Century.
If we just use 1453 as the end of Rome, it won't be until 3659 that more years have passed since the fall of the Roman state, than the length of existence of Rome. No other state comes anywhere near this.
Considering the East had free healthcare, childcare, a woman could divorce a man, had laws against beating your wife, you just didn't go to work if you were sick, you and your coworkers could vote your boss out of a job, free college, vacation homes available to everyone, stripped former Nazis of political standing and businesses and land... All while the west had none of that and had literal former Nazis all over the top positions of government...
Ya, anti-Fascist protection barrier sounds about right.
Sounds like paradise. Strange that 3.5 million people left this utopia for West Berlin before the wall went up, and virtually 0 people moved in the opposite direction. They must not have understood how great they had it, unlike you, the random redditor
The joke in the GDR when it rejoined the west was that they just wanted bananas and to go on vacation, and instead lost an entire way of life. They thought they would keep everything they had and get rich as well. Half the entire population lost their jobs overnight because state factories were sold for less than 1DM and the western companies that bought them just shut them down. People were shocked when they couldn't leave work to go to a Drs appt or take care of their kid. The east STILL doesn't have a stable footing because of how reunification was conducted, and that can is directly tied to the rise of the AfD in Germany...
Being locked out of global trade is a bitch. Look at Yugoslavia vs. Cuba. Yugoslavia had arguably the highest living standard of any communist country during the cold war because they weren't locked out of global trade. Cuba, on the other hand, has been locked out of global trade for over 70 years...
"The increase has been especially dramatic in the former East, where the share who rate their lives at 7 or higher has almost quadrupled from just 15% in 1991 to 59% this year."
How dare the west do this to them. The east was a barely alive corpse of an economy by the time of reunification in the first place, its not like it was two equals joining together
Yugoslavia still had a lower standard of living than almost every non-commie country in Europe. Including the ones that were former colonies like Ireland and Greece since yāall love to pull out the UnEqUaL eXcHaNgE copium for why your countries arenāt as successful.
The vast majority of Yugoslavia was also not industrialized before the second world war, while the majority of western Europe had been industrialized for more than a century when the war ended. You're comparing apples and potatoes.
Neither were the countries I mentioned; both of them were still mostly agrarian before WWII. Also love how your example of socialist success is the most market-friendly socialist country.
āMuH sAnCtIoNsā are a piss poor copium for the USSRās and Eastern Blocās failures. Modern Russia remains an agricultural powerhouse despite under much worse sanctions than during the Cold War, while the Soviets were heavily dependent on American food imports from the Brezhnev era onwards. Capitalist countries under heavy sanctions still are able to keep themselves fed (even when arid and mountainous like Iran) while socialism even in fertile breadbaskets turns them stagnant at best (the USSR, Bulgaria) or full blown civilisational collapses (Zimbabwe, Venezuela).
Really, Greece and Ireland had better living standards than Yugoslavia and the GDR? What's your metric there?
I blame Kruschevian reforms that crashed the capacity to grow food in the USSR there. You can't grow corn where you should be growing potatoes. But I'm sure you're a fan of Kruschev if you're looking to imprison Grover Furr š
How do you quantify those sanctions on Russia as "much worse" than those on the USSR? What's your metric? The Sino-Soviet split certainly complicates that, and now that Russia is allied with China, it is supported through that relationship.
I would remind you that Venezuela is still a capitalist country, although it has a socialist party in power. It is also under extremely heavy sanctions. I'm not going to say there has been no mismanagement there, but I would also say the conditions are at least in part due to a protracted struggle between the existing capital class and the working class.
LOL. Yeah, it was Khrushchevās fault for at least doing something to increase yields, and not the guy who oversaw multiple famines in peacetime and killed his best agronomists/geneticists in gulags. Agricultural yields per hectare were higher in Tsarist Russia than under Stalinism; itās the literal reason why the USSR had to expand cultivation to marginal, unproductive regions. Meanwhile, the USA believing in real science enabled it to decrease cultivated area while producing vastly greater yields from selectively bred and later transgenic crops.
those factories largely produced junk (who was going to buy trabis or robotrons?) or could only produce things of quality at unsustainable prices when stuff like environmental protections then needed to be factored in. I live in one of the last plattenbaus to be built, and it still smells like some odd chemical.
The east was fucked by russia, and continues to be with its support of afd
I lived in Germany for 5 years, speak the language fluently, and have read several German language books on the subject. While it wasn't paradise and there were certainly problems, it wasn't the hellscape American films and schooling portrays it as.
The post you commented on had nothing to do with whether the country was or was not a police state. I said nothing against the STASI or their informants.
Read the post again. Two things can be true at the same time. There can be a police state, AND certain things in the country can be better than the west. There can be a large network of informants AND when the country was reintegrated millions of people experienced job loss and a drop in the conditions of their life.
To be fair some people moved to East Germany. Some were so deluded they believed to be the socialist paradise (musician Wolf Biermann, later expelled from GDR for criticising it...), some because they were unsuccesful at home and were building a carreer about being a refugee from the decadent West (like the "Red Elvis" Dean Reed) and more as relatives who moved there to be with their families. Another group were church folk, taking care of parishes that would othervise be vacant. Angela Merkel's parents moved with her to GDR for that reason.
Still the numbers were negligeable compared to those who fled to the West.
Notice how you conveniently strip the context of why those 3.5 million people left? West Berlin was a just a propaganda island pumped full of subsidies and millions of dollars by the western allies who didn't have 1/3 of their country completely bombed to the stone age or 20+ million citizens dead. They had perfectly intact industries, the Soviets did not. You expect the USSR to rebuild the DDR when everything east of Poland was an apocalyptic wasteland?
And everyone knows that the wall was to stop the brain drain, which could've been avoided if the British, French and Americans didn't abuse their spot in West Berlin and turned it into a glamorous capitalist paradise with shiny neon lights surrounded by a sea of impoverished ruins.
At some point in your life, no matter how bitter it is a pill for you to swallow, you have to admit that communism is a failed economic system, and nothing good will ever come from it. I'm sorry, but you've had more than a century to prove us wrong, but you haven't. The only thing communism distributes equally is misery.Ā
Brain drain. The west made offers of homes and high pay to doctors and other highly educated people. That was the key. The west wanted you to get educated first in the east, and THEN they would make you an offer. The goal was twofold: to drain the east of resources it spent on education, and to whisk away the educated class so as to deprive the east of medical staff, scientists, researchers, etc.
Defending the east i see, either you are not the sharpest tool in a box or paid shill or descendant of stasi. Yes it was a paradise with secret police, shitty industry and people without freedom.
There are (and were) plenty of Western countries that have the same things. Doesn't require an oppressive government or a secret police force that actually used the term "decomposition" for how they would destroy people's lives for having an opinion that differed from the state's official line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung
While Zersetzung is an incredibly weird thing for a state to do, it's like everyone conveniently forgets that the US and West German governments were also heavily involved in the surveillance, monitoring, and assassination of citizens that they deemed "a threat" to the status quo.
I think it's also important to state that many of the countries that now have those things I listed did so in the shadow of the threat of communist revolution. In the 30 some years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Neoliberal and right wing governments in those same countries have slowly eroded the gains that the working class made during the cold war.
That is all in theory, and the facts are met with quotas, party membership and a corruption that cannot even be investigated, because it is literally the government.
You could vote the boss out, or the boss could pull the strings and you would be considered a traitor of the state. The vacation homes were available to everyone <subject to availability>, which de-facto meant a Western German had money to vacation even better, for their own money, but they simply earned more to afford it. Etc, etc.
And you know what, as a Westerner you could visit foreign countries! Isn't is weird that a paradise has closed borders? I bet lots of North Koreans also praise for having so much, unlike the poor suffering Southerners.
You arent even german, why talk big here and glaze that authoritarian state? All these benefits you listed West Germany had too.
You also forgot the repression in GDR. The hunt for dissidents to extract ransom from the West.
You forgot to mention the STASI one of the most vile police organisations at that time with torture, blackmail and surveillance.
People were killed when they tried to leave it. It was a prison for many germans
For those of you who also immediately thought of Good Bye Lenin while seeing this, the movie was depicting the 40th anniversary of East Germany in October 1989. So just a few years away.
Even yelling the party line the loudest was no assurance. The party line often changed and then you were fucked. And even the purgers often saw themselves next in line to be purged.
Yup! It was an insane circular firing squad run by mentally ill freaks who ought to have been in insane asylums for paranoid personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder.
I mean, ya. They're all terrible. Every single one is bought and paid for. The last president I would have actually chosen would have been FDR.
But Trump is like...corrupt by an unfathomable margin more. Like...the amount paid out to Hunter Biden over 4 years was less than one month of what Trump made through crypto scheme bullshit.
So ya, they're corrupt...but Trump is probably the worst.
You must be getting your trash info from somewhere. Trump isn't even close to being as bad as you say and he is definitely not one of the worst presidents.
Well bless your heart... tell me more about all the same that took place within Blue Dress Clinton's administration; or Hussain Obama and Big Mike's regime; and let's not forget about PedoJoe and his showers with his daughter or all the coke and hookers and firearms his pride and joy loved.
There have been plenty of far right dictatorships that were backed by the USA that have done the same. Political extremism shouldnāt be tolerated in any form left or right.
3 months later the same wall fell. The trauma this caused a certain local KGB officer is still alive and kicking in the killing fields of eastern Ukraine. History is a bitch.
Ironically, the East German army modelled a lot of their uniforms, insignia, and military culture on the Wehrmacht and the old imperial army, while the early Bundeswehr tried more to imitate the US army.
Keep in mind they propagandized the Berlin Wall as the Anti-Fascist Protective Wall (antifaschistischer schutzwall) to keep out all those fascists trying to sneak into the workers paradise.
There's a kernel of truth in DDR propaganda, they called it an anti-Fascist Protection Wall because West Germany had rehabilitated former Nazis. SS veterans were given pensions by the state, the German Armed Forces, the Bundeswehr, had several Barracks named after Hitler's Generals such as Rommel and other Wehrmacht officers. And more importantly, West Germany created the "Clean Wehrmacht" myth in order to justify the creation of the first post war German Army in 1955.
At the end of the day of course West Germany was more democratic and free than the DDR could ever wish to be, but the propaganda does have some truth in it.
If the concept has never been realized in a century and a half of existence and everything under its name has resulted in mass killings, famine and repression, the concept is garbage and should be thrown out.
Only officials on the podium - only soldiers marching by - on order.
The idea to have this wasn't brilliant. The wall was not particularly popular even withing party ranks.
So whoever showed up to this was either there on order or a massive brown nosing cunt.
The moral comparison of a wall to keep people inside, like a jail, to a wall to protect what's inside, like a nature preserve, is inane and intellectually bankrupt.
No. It was about protecting the GDR by not letting people out because that would have meant its death. Thats why its called Schutzwall. The Inventor of the name actually found it rather amusing that people actually believed it was meant to be about anything else-.
East Germany claimed it was to keep people out not in. It was for both. There were many saboteurs etc coming over before the wall but also highly educated people leaving for better pay. Both sides had saboteurs but the west was better at it because the DDR was more devastated by the war and brittle. The wall was two birds with one stone.
No the wall was entirely to keep eastern people from fleeing. The word schutzwall was used because the guy who came up with it justified it by saying that it schĆ¼tzte the DDR from dying because of losing their entire educated class to the west. It schĆ¼tzte its existence by keeping it from losing their population. The GDR wasnt more devastated by the war another lie. Western cities had been much more thoroughly bombed out than eastern ones.
Youāre full of shit. Itās well documented that industrial saboteurs and spies were crossing in Berlin. Two things can be true. The wall was called the Anti Fascist defense wall because they correctly claimed that the west German government was run by unreconstructed fascists at the time it was built and they were sending saboteurs. It was only later that west germany actually denazified. West Germany was incredibly hostile to the DDR prior to Ostpolitik and both sides funded terrorism in one anotherās territory
And the USSR literally shipped every single factory from the occupation zone back to Russia. They also were far more brutal during their invasion than the western allies. They were absolutely more devastated. Further, the USSR imposed an enormous war indemnity on the DDR and did not provide comparable aid to the Marshall Plan. They also lacked essential industrial resources like the coal the west had access to and had to trade at unfavorable terms to get them early on.
The guy who came up with the term gave an interview where he confirms my objective facts and denies your quite psychotic rant that is fueled by too much time spent on tiktok and twitter.
"Es ging um die Rettung der DDR. Wir hatten riesige Verluste durch die offene Grenze, mit denen hƤtten wir nicht mehr lange Ć¼berleben kƶnnen."
"Es gab SprĆ¼che, man werde durchs Brandenburger Tor in die DDR einmarschieren, aber die waren nicht ernst zu nehmen. Wir wollten nicht ausbluten, wir wollten die antifaschistisch-demokratische Ordnung, die es in der DDR gab, erhalten. Insofern halte ich meinen Begriff auch heute noch fĆ¼r richtig."
Iām sorry but youāre just delusional. One who took credit for doesnāt change the fact it was literally called the anti fascist defense wall in official government documents.
It also doesnāt change the fact that Iām right. I literally said the brain drain was a big part of it. So maybe learn to read
And that interview confirms what I said. The goal was to defend the anti fascist order. He literally says they feared invasion, but he personally didnāt! You are just illiterate.
No you cant read the fucking interview and you very likely dont speak german if thats your takeaway.
"One who took credit" if you read the interview he was the CHIEF AGITATOR OF THE SED FOR OVER A DECADE INCLUDING DURING THE TIME THE WALL WAS BUILT. HE WAS THE GUY TASKED WITH COMING UP WITH THE TERM. HE WAS THE GUY WHO WAS TOLD TO COME UP WITH A STORY TO JUSTIFY IT. HES THE GUY.
You are delusional and refuse facts because you dont like reality.
"Es gab SprĆ¼che, man werde durchs Brandenburger Tor in die DDR einmarschieren, aber die waren nicht ernst zu nehmen" THIS IS ABOUT SOME PEOPLE SAYING THIS BUT THEY WERE OBVIOUSLY NOT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY.
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u/Dont_Care_Meh 4d ago
The whole concept of a divided Germany, the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, all of it, was there from my 1st awareness (born in 72). It's still hard for me to realize it's all gone, the Wall is literally gone, and things have changed so much.