From the DW:
“Opinion: Take interest in
Germany's East!”
It's only now, 30 years after the
Berlin Wall came down, that we're beginning to grasp how brutal the
post-communist transformation was for East Germany. My generation can help
bridge the gap, says DW's Linda Vierecke. Imagine that from one day to the
next, your entire life is turned upside down. Your job disappears, your degree
is worthless, and the values that governed society are suddenly different. Your
friends move away because there are no jobs where you live. Your entire social
net unravels. Lately, I've been asking myself how I would have coped with such
a radical transformation. My father was 36 when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.
Today, I'm exactly his age. He worked as a physicist in a steel factory, but he
never really managed to find a proper job again after Germany reunified.
East Germany: Every family
struggled
I think we're only now really
starting to understand how massive this transformation was for East Germans.
Every family has its own stories. There are countless tales of men and women
who lost their jobs and had to start over and retrain to get new degrees. Tales
of families who packed up their things and moved to western Germany to find
work. And also tales of those who stayed behind, turning to alcohol to fill the
void. Then there are the tales of children like me. We grew up in a political
and economic system in which our parents had no connections and that they could
not help us navigate. One figure that
always makes my draw drop is this one: After German reunification, the birth
rate in former East Germany dropped by 50% — an even greater fall than in the
wake of World War I or World War II! And yet many politicians have acted as if
it were just a matter of time until differences between the eastern and the
western Germany finally disappear. This still hasn't happened — even though
€1.6 trillion ($1.8 trillion) in state funding has been invested in the East. Current
statistics clearly show an East-West divide. In eastern Germany, people earn on
average 17% less than their western peers. My mother has worked as a teacher
for 43 years, but her pension will be smaller than that of a teacher in the
West. This, to me, is simply unfair. And it's also unfair to my generation,
which can expect far less financial support from our parents for reasons like
these.
Western German hands hold power
I also find it shocking that so
few eastern Germans hold positions of power in today's Germany; they fill only
1.7% of the country's top jobs. This means the vast majority of lawyers,
university deans, high-level national politicians and so forth hail from the
West. Even in the eastern part of the country, most decision-makers are from
western Germany. During reunification, West Germans took over leadership roles
in the East, which had been held by people close to the communist government. But
what was originally designed as an interim solution has become deeply
entrenched. Today, a western German elite dominates eastern Germany. The stats
prove it. In addition, the many positive experiences people had in East Germany
were either barely appreciated or simply remain completely unknown. My mother,
for example, worked her entire life, just like all women I knew. For me, it
goes without saying that you can have children and pursue a career. Most of my
female friends from western Germany do not have such role models. And when
Germany celebrated 100 years of female suffrage this past summer, barely anyone
mentioned the contributions of emancipated women in East Germany.
No system lasts forever
Now, 30 years after the fall of
the Berlin Wall, the political situation is forcing Germany to take a closer
look at the experiences of eastern Germans. The right-wing populist Alternative
for Germany (AfD) party is roughly twice as strong in the country's East as in
the West. I'm the last person who'd try to defend the party, because there is
no justification for racism and exclusion. But it is impossible to overlook the
feeling among eastern Germans that they're not full participants in society. If we want to keep whole regions from going in
a different direction, we need to start taking action. We need to do much more
to support economically underdeveloped eastern regions and start paying wages
on par with the West. Companies must use quotas to commit to promoting
employees from the East. And more than anything, we need to work hard to stop
society from drifting apart. But even more than political concessions, I would
like to see people in western Germany take a greater interest in what their
eastern peers went though — the setbacks they faced, their stories of
reunification and how they feel today. And what about my generation? I was born
in 1982, which makes me part of the generation that grew up in a reunified
Germany. If there's one thing we learned, it's that no political system lasts
forever, and that one must always keep adapting while making sure no one gets
left behind. This ability to transform is an important skill today, too, as we
face the fast and far-reaching evolution of digital technologies. We've reached
an age where we are ready to take on responsibility. So — when can we start?
^ This was a good opinion piece about
the realities of the Fall of the Berlin Wall on East Germans. Unlike other Eastern
European Communist countries: the Soviet Union (today Russia, Ukraine, Belarus,
Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan), Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia
(today: the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Romania, Yugoslavia (today: Serbia,
Montenegro, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia and
Herzegovina), Albania and Bulgaria which collectively went through the fall of
Communism and had to start from scratch East Germany was simply absorbed into
West Germany and so was expected to adapt Democracy and the West German way of
doing everything overnight with those former East Germans not able to falling
through the “cracks” which continues even 30 years later. ^
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