75 years of the GDR: Are East Germans Martians?

Before the GDR collapsed, the term “Germany” was hardly taken seriously in the Federal Republic of Germany. It existed in the Sunday speeches of CDU politicians and on the sports pages of newspapers, because the West German national teams were always called “Germany,” even when they competed against those of the GDR. That was absurd and an indication of latent political demands. That’s why the German-German border was only shown with dashed lines on the maps in geography lessons. But in the late old Federal Republic of Germany, people defined themselves by regions, metropolitan areas and large cities. “Germany” actually seemed unknown. The term was a thing of the past and the GDR was abroad.

Suddenly everything should be Germany again. First the GDR was bankrupt and then disappeared with real socialism. Helmut Kohl ultimately successfully persuaded her to do so. The West German left was deeply offended because the overwhelming majority of the GDR population had no desire to embark on the fabled “third way” between capitalism and socialism or even to implement “true socialism.” Instead, “The Eternal West,” as the philosopher Jürgen Große called his new book, shone.

Actually logical if the East has disappeared. But also problematic, because the West sees itself as “normal zero” and judges everything from this position: The East, what it once was and what it is today, is always the deviation, just a reduced version. It was joined to the West, some say colonized, with the argument: “You wanted it that way, now see what the prices are.”

The “eternal West” is based on the idea of ​​a “liberal modernity.” But you could also say: on the charisma of Hollywood and rock’n’roll. The economic distortions are secondary to this. That is why the East had to undergo what the (Western) social scientists call “catch-up modernization.” Even if after 1989 this meant deindustrialization and the associated impoverishment and unemployment, so that 1.7 million people moved from the East to the West.

“An imaginary Federal Republic of Germany acts as a modern theoretical interpretive instance, understood as the eternal West or ‘on the way there,’” writes Große. It is claimed that this is the only place where prosperity, democracy and satisfaction prevail, even if everything there is going down the drain today in the “polyvalent crises”, as the Greens like to put it. Nevertheless, according to Große, the “eternal West” only exists “thanks to an East (a history, a Germany) from which it constantly has to free itself.”

It was only through the annexation of East Germany that West Germany developed an awareness of itself, says Große. He calls this “gnostic excesses”: a battle of light against darkness, transitions are excluded. “East Germans are Martians,” is what people in the West believe. But you can’t recognize them because they look like you. That’s why this is primarily about culture wars. Große also sees the rebellion of the ’68 as a debate about discourse and not as an expression of a social conflict. It is a brutal irony of history that today the AfD plays the leading role in the culture war by promoting the idea of ​​cultural difference: as a threatening fantasy in order to shift the discourse to the right towards authoritarianism.

For big people, the West is generally characterized by “poverty of experience and wealth of opinions, volatility and self-centeredness.” In his opinion, “gnostic excesses” have been experiencing a renaissance since the Russian attack on Ukraine. But Germany’s ties to the West are not metaphysics, but were created politically: “With the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949, an entire country fled to the West, escaped German guilt,” as Große puts it, and switched to the right side, so to speak.

In the East, however, according to Große, “distance from the state and ideological skepticism” developed; for him, these were the “long-term consequences of the experience of dictatorship and upheaval” simply because the state appeared to be overwhelmingly powerful in the GDR. Große considers the collapsed GDR to be a “school of the concrete” with an “immunization against everything airy and phrase-like” that was so hard on the official side that in this country of mass marches and glorification of the state, private life took on a much greater importance than in the West. where private property is state doctrine. You acquire it through willingness to perform (even if you inherit it), which is why an almost Calvinistic work ethic that was foreign to the GDR dominates.

But what does the rise of the right in the East have to do with the GDR? Because there has never been as little GDR in the former GDR as there is today. One might think: The West is not doing well. Maybe it’s like in the cartoon: He’s already over the abyss, just running in the air and then he falls – deeply.

Jürgen Große: The Eternal West. How a country searched for itself and found the old Federal Republic. The New Berlin, 240 pages, br., 20 €.