German Unity: A strange creature called Ossi

Yes, the “Ossi” is a strange species: quarrelsome and unruly, constantly complaining and complaining, defiant, constantly offended and resistant to instruction, whining and needing help, non-conformist, dissatisfied and ungrateful despite the “blessings” the West bestowed on him in 1990 came. The best thing to do is to reverse the accession, as the “Ossis” should rebuild their GDR. Or better yet, in order not to lose out on the profitable bargains that were obtained in the East over three decades ago: relocate all rebellious East Germans far away to a distant island in the Pacific. So that peace can return to the Federal Republic.

Why are East Germans so different? Growing up in a dictatorship and kept immature for 40 years, one would have expected cowering and a spirit of subjugation. How could a “regime” that has “dwarfed the people for almost half a century,” as the West Berlin political scientist Arnulf Baring once said, produce such relentless troublemakers who threaten to “neglect” and “proletarianize” the Federal Republic, like the one in 1991 hallucinated.

While the strange behavior of the “Ossis” was initially dismissed as “Ostalgie”, people have recently moved on to studying and analyzing the strange creature more closely in order to treat and cure it in the desired way. The eternal East German on the psycho couch. Especially recently, many publications have appeared that deal with its otherness. A difference in mentality is usually assumed to be due to different socialization. Serious scientists and journalists, often younger and mostly East German, are not satisfied with the convenient verdict that East Germans are inherently anti-democratic and unsuitable for democracy. What was and is claimed not only by Western “experts” like Baring, but also by individual representatives of this East German “ethnicity”, from the former records manager Joachim Gauck to the government’s Eastern Commissioner Marco Wanderwitz.

Although there are neither “the” East Germans nor “the” West Germans, a tenacious Eastern identity is unmistakable, and dissent between East and West is undeniable. What cannot be explained by conflicting customs and customs, culinary preferences or linguistic misunderstandings, such as the animosity between Berliners and Bavarians. So it needs to be plumbed deeper. Maybe the stubbornness of the East Germans has something to do with the former GDR? With freedoms and rights experienced there despite lack of freedom and limited rights? With an attempt at an alternative model of society, called socialism.

Maybe the rebelliousness of the East Germans has something to do with the GDR?

At least that’s what Ellen Handel and Ute Mitsching-Viertel asked themselves. From 2017 to 2022, they interviewed 81 men and women from the GDR – about their lives in two social systems, in the GDR and in the Federal Republic. The duo admits that surveys that are considered representative require a larger number of test subjects. Nevertheless, her selection of interviewees with different social backgrounds, professional activities and ideological orientation, from the LPG farmer and primary school teacher to the cultural scientist to the general director, can be considered quite meaningful. Dealers/Mitsching-Viertel, both born in 1948, can also confirm their statements through their own experience.

Contrary to popular claims, the sociologist and political scientist emphasize: Nobody wants the GDR back. But also: “The biographical experiences under socialism still determine large parts of life today and also have an impact on the outside world.” And against the assumption that the “Ossis” were all “damaged by dictatorship,” they remind: “East Germans showed that with the fall of communism and how they can do democracy.«

One reads and is amazed at the volume “The GDR is sustainable”, which was just presented by dealers/Mitsching-Viertel, with which they virtually complete a trilogy that was included in their previous volumes “Unerhörte Ostfrauen” and “Problemzone Ostmann?” Evaluate documented conversations: There were experiences of democracy in the GDR that East Germans miss today! And this not only applies to the sophisticated input system, but above all to company co-determination, which is perceived as more direct than today. The right to work was also highlighted as positive by those surveyed. Mass unemployment was the first formative negative experience in “unified” Germany. Of the 81 men and women interviewed by the author duo, 60 were no longer working in their trained professions after 1990. The “work collective” including shared leisure activities, which is ridiculed in the West, is a pleasant memory. Equal pay for equal work, guaranteed in the GDR constitution, is internalized as a matter of course that clashes with the reality in the Federal Republic. The total exchange of elites is accused of being discriminatory.

It is not surprising that the more advanced emancipation of women in the GDR is recognized, which enabled them to combine work and family thanks to a wide range of state support, from kindergartens and after-school care to support for single mothers, as well as the more progressive family and divorce law compared to the Federal Republic. Nevertheless, patriarchal behavior continued in everyday life. The health and education system in so-called real socialism is praised as superior to that of the Federal Republic: no two-tier medicine and general and higher education regardless of wallet. Ideological overloading of learning content and military studies lessons are, of course, viewed as harassment.

Of course, GDR experiences and influences are passed on to children and grandchildren. Who’s surprised? Especially whether it was the subsequent humiliation and unequal treatment, material and biographical expropriations, lower wages and pensions, fewer career opportunities, ignorance and arrogance, which also includes the fact that the GDR’s positive achievements were not even put to the test during the unification process. »The GDR was a society whose everyday life included political, economic and cultural contradictions. Very good social benefits, low rents, inexpensive food and more were achievements that were counteracted in various areas by discrimination against opponents, imprisonment of those wishing to leave the country and censorship in the media landscape,” write dealers/Mitsching-Viertel. “To be once again placed one-sidedly and politically in the corner of ‘extremism’ and a ‘defective democrat’ in the face of resistance reminds him (the East German) of things that he thought he had overcome and yet finds again.”

In short: a band, no, a trilogy, which deserves an attentive readership.

Ellen Handel/ Uta Mitsching-Viertel: The GDR is sustainable. A polemic on Eastern identity. Ibidem Verlag, S,., br., €14.90.