Lingering Divide - Why East and West Germany Are Drifting Apart - Financial Times

8/29/2019 Lingering divide: why east and west Germany are drifting apart | Financial Times
The Big Read German politics
Lingering divide: why east and west Germany are drifting apart
Economic disappointment and historic grievances fuel anger ahead of crucial elections
Tobias Buck in Lenzen 10 HOURS AGO
A single watchtower is all that remains of the feared border that once separated East Germany
from West Germany on the banks of the river Elbe near the town of Lenzen.
In the bad old days, three decades ago, there was a line of towers stretching all along the river,
connected by fences topped with razor wire and patrolled by armed guards with dogs. Those who
dared to flee the communist East by swimming across the treacherous river would be shot on sight.
In 1963, a young man attempting the crossing drowned in this spot, one of hundreds who died
trying to escape the German Democratic Republic.
East German border guards look through a hole in the Berlin wall in 1989. There is a feeling the long process of east-west convergence has now slipped
into reverse © Lionel Cironneau/AP
Today, the watchtower offers a poignant reminder of the harsh repression inflicted by the East
German regime on its citizens — and a suitable backdrop for Christian Hirte on his latest summer
tour of the region. The government’s commissioner for eastern Germany has come to Lenzen to
talk to locals who fled and later returned, and to visit a nearby museum documenting the history of
the GDR. Above all, Mr Hirte has come to deliver a political message: despite the glum mood
hanging over eastern Germany these days, reunification was a resounding success.
“Eastern Germany is today objectively in a better situation than it has ever been,” he insists, as he
hurtles from one event to the next in a vintage East German Wartburg car. “We have to stop using
https://www.ft.com/content/a22d04b2-c4b0-11e9-a8e9-296ca66511c9 1/11
this negative tone. We have every reason to look back on our achievements with pride.”
Christian Hirte, commissioner for eastern Germany: 'We have to stop using this negative tone [about reunification]. We have every reason to look back on
our achievements with pride'
That sense of pride and achievement, however, is notably absent as Germans approach a series of
crucial electoral tests in the east, as well as the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in
November. Instead, there is a growing feeling that the long process of convergence has not just
stalled, but slipped into reverse. Today, Germans in east and west not only vote differently, think
differently and feel differently — but those differences seem to be growing more pronounced.
The split echoes divisions that have appeared in countries around the world, including the UK and
the US, where opposing social and political tribes glower at one another in mutual
incomprehension. Fuelled by a familiar blend of economic disappointment, political alienation and
historic grievance, the new east-west rift has nevertheless taken many Germans by surprise.
“After the collapse of East Germany, we thought that we would become more and more alike.
Today we see that many of these differences have taken root,” says Steffen Mau, professor of
sociology at Humboldt University in Berlin. “The east did not become like the west. Instead, we
saw a build-up of frustration and disappointment in eastern Germany.”
Evidence of a widening gulf has become too copious to ignore. Last month, for example, a poll by
the Allensbach Institute asked eastern Germans whether they saw democracy as practised in
Germany as the best form of government. Only 31 per cent agreed. Two years ago, the figure was 53
per cent. In western Germany, meanwhile, 72 per cent described democracy as the best form of
government, broadly unchanged from two decades ago.
The same divergence shows up when Germans in both parts of the country are asked about their
identity: 47 per cent of eastern Germans say they identify above all as eastern Germans, compared
with only 44 per cent who feel simply German. This, too, is a sharp reversal from only a few years
ago. Also striking is the sheer persistence of specifically eastern German views and stereotypes:
even 30 years after the fall of the wall (and with an east German chancellor, Angela Merkel, holding
office since 2005), more than a third of eastern Germans describe themselves as “second-class
citizens”.
The political gulf between east and west will be on dramatic display this Sunday, when the eastern
federal states of Saxony and Brandenburg hold regional elections. Polls suggest the far-right
Alternative for Germany could emerge victorious in both ballots, a triumph for the xenophobic,
anti-European party that would be unthinkable in the west. As Renate Köcher, director of the
Allensbach Institute, says: “We see an increasing divergence in voting patterns between east and
west.”
Another distinguishing feature in the east is the continued strength of the far-left Die Linke party,
the successor of the former East German Communist party. In Saxony, the AfD and Die Linke are
expected to garner about 40 per cent of the total vote — a rich reward for two parties that sit on
opposite ends of the political spectrum but that both make a blunt appeal to eastern Germans’
grievances and sense of separate identity.
“In the 1990s there was a real sense of departure in eastern Germany. People thought: everything
will be better now,” says Lars Hünich, one of the AfD’s candidates for the regional parliament in
Brandenburg. “Thirty years later you realise that things have turned out differently. The people in
the east feel abandoned.”
Alternative for Germany supporters at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin during a rally last year. Polls suggest the far-right party could emerge victorious
from regional elections in Saxony and Brandenburg on Sunday
That feeling of abandonment is not easy to back up with hard numbers. In the years since
reunification, the east has received hundreds of billions of euros from the west to fund
reconstruction and development. Unemployment — once a blight affecting millions of easterners —
has plunged to record lows. Economic growth is stronger than in the west while salaries and
pensions, though still lower in the region, have risen strongly in recent years. Cities such as
Dresden, Leipzig and Potsdam, whose buildings were crumbling to the point of collapse, have been
painstakingly restored to their former glory. Environmental disaster zones such as the “chemical
triangle” north of Leipzig were cleaned up.
That triumphal narrative, however, fails to account for the personal disappointment and bitterness
experienced by millions of eastern Germans in the years after reunification. From one day to the
next, much of their experience and achievement was regarded as worthless; millions fell into
unemployment, or had to take on jobs that were far below their qualifications; hundreds of
thousands were forced to leave their hometowns and find work in the prosperous west. Easterners
found themselves thrust into a system whose rules they barely understood, and that many felt ill-
equipped to master.
The writer and activist Frank Richter says 'the great hopes and illusions that people had, the idea that we would now live in paradise, those hopes were
disappointed' © Stephan Floss/FT
“You walk through cities in eastern Germany and everything looks great. We spent all this time
painting our façades. But now we realise what is going on behind those façades,” says Frank
Richter, a writer and activist in the Saxon city of Meissen. “The great hopes and illusions that
people had, the idea that we would now live in paradise, those hopes were disappointed. Now
people look back and they realise: my children are gone [to the west] and they won’t come back. My
grandchildren have gone and they won’t come back.”
The exodus of more than 1.9m eastern Germans since 1989 is seen by many as a key reason for
the malaise. Those who left were overwhelmingly young, ambitious and well-educated — precisely
the kind of citizens the east needs today to strengthen the economic and democratic fibres of
society. Among those who stayed put, a certain nostalgia has taken root, along with a deep anxiety
about yet more upheaval and change.
“There is a great fear of loss here in eastern Germany,” says Petra Köpping, a Social Democrat
leader in Saxony and the regional government’s integration minister. “Everything that people have
here they built up with their own hands [after reunification]. They want to hold on to that. And
when they hear that there will be more change — be it as a result of migration, globalisation or the
digital revolution — they are afraid that they will lose everything all over again.”
Refugees arrive in Saalfeld, central Germany. More than 1m mainly Muslim refugees arrived in Germany 2015-16, leading many eastern Germans to
believe their needs were being forgotten by the state © AP
That nagging fear, she argues, was activated in particular by the 2015-16 refugee crisis, when more
than 1m mainly Muslim refugees from countries such as Syria and Iraq arrived in Germany.
“People said to me: ‘You and your refugees! You should integrate us first!,” says Ms Köpping. Time
and again, she was confronted with the accusation that the same state that had left eastern
Germans to fend for themselves during the post-1990 collapse was lavishing benefits and support
on refugees. “That was the way they saw things: there’s money for them but not for us,” she says.
Mathias Höhn, a member of parliament for Die Linke and the party’s spokesman on eastern
German affairs, points to another source of frustration: the sudden retreat of the state and public
services in a region where the state used to take care of everything. “What makes this situation so
difficult is that the transformation process [after 1990] coincided with the dismantling of the state.
Schools were closed, train lines were closed. Today, the hospital is far away and politicians are far
away,” he says. “This has given people the feeling that they have little to expect from the state, and
that they have been left alone.”
For much of the recent past, that sense of abandonment was picked up and amplified above all by
Mr Höhn’s own party. Today, the same sentiment drives more and more voters in eastern Germany
into the arms of the AfD. Though most of its leaders come from the west, it has managed to present
itself as an authentic voice of the east, vowing to complete the East German revolution of 1989 by
toppling the old liberal order of the federal republic.
A hole in the old Berlin Wall

That stance produces some glaring contradictions: the AfD draws frequent comparisons between
the totalitarian nature of the GDR and present-day Germany, which it likes to portray as a
dictatorship of political correctness. At the same time, the party taps into a powerful sense of
nostalgia for a past that some AfD voters remember as more orderly, more equal and more
homogenous than the chaotic present.
“In the GDR everyone was the same. You stood together,” says Frank Schröter, an AfD voter
attending a recent election rally in Brandenburg. “Some things have improved since reunification
but many of us have come to realise that not everything that glitters is gold.”
Borrowing a term from clinical psychology, Mr Richter argues that eastern Germany suffers
from a collective outbreak of “embitterment disorder” — a delayed response to the shocks and
humiliations suffered in the post-unification years, when impossibly high hopes were crushed by
the post-unification economic downturn.
“Every human being has to have some basic assumptions, for example that his work is worth
something, that promises are kept and that there is at least some degree of justice in life,” he says.
“When those basic assumptions are shattered, and there is no way to resist, then you get those
embitterment syndromes. And those in turn can lead to aggression or depression.”
Until recently, most western Germans felt little need to understand — let alone address — the
unease and anger festering in the east. Reunification was seen as a historical event, a chapter
successfully closed. Indeed, some believe that attitude is still pervasive today. “The people in
western Germany don’t understand the problems of eastern Germany,” says Ms Köpping. “When
you ask people in the west what changed for them after reunification, they answer: nothing. When
you ask people in the east, they say: everything.”
Yet others sense that the ignorance and lack of interest are at last starting to change. The success of
the AfD has led westerners to look at the east with dismay and exasperation — but also with a
renewed sense of curiosity and concern. That may be cause for optimism as Germans on both sides
of the old-new divide look back. “The west thought for the longest time that the problems of
eastern Germany were a problem only for eastern Germany,” says Mr Richter. “Now the west has
realised: the problems of the east are the problems for all of Germany.”
East feels ‘humiliation’ over lack of elite roles

German reunification meant the end of an East German elite that had kept tight control over the
country’s government, administration, military, industry, legal system and academia. Virtually
overnight, all but a handful of those leadership positions were taken over by westerners, who
flocked to the east in their thousands in the years after 1990.
As happy as many eastern Germans were to see the old guard go, the arrival of a new set of
bosses from the west aroused mixed emotions. The real problem, however, was that they never
left. According to a recent study by the University of Leipzig, only one in five leadership positions
in eastern Germany today is held by easterners. In regional ministries and in the media, the
number of eastern Germans has in fact declined over time.
Looking at Germany as a whole, the region is even more under-represented: a study from 2017
found that eastern Germans held just 1.7 per cent of top jobs in politics, the federal courts, the
military and business, even though the east accounted for 17 per cent of the population.
“For eastern Germans, this whole leadership structure comes across as a humiliation,” says Petra
Köpping, a Social Democrat leader from Saxony. “They say: ‘evidently people in the west don’t
think we are capable of being in charge.’”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2019. All rights reserved.

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8/29/2019 Lingering divide: why east and west Germany are drifting apart | Financial Times

The Big Read German politics

Tobias Buck in Lenzen 10 HOURS AGO

A hole in the old Berlin Wall

East feels ‘humiliation’ over lack of elite roles

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2019. All rights reserved.

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