7 ms·

How was it a disaster? When West Germany merged with East the impact upon GDP wasn't dramatic and it was a democratic choice. Indeed it went so well, I dare s

by Zenst 6y ago

How was it a disaster? When West Germany merged with East the impact upon GDP wasn't dramatic and it was a democratic choice. Indeed it went so well, I dare say it was a motivator towards more integration within the EU and will say the EU went on a pokemon phase not long after in member growth. Which even the EU phrases as "Re-unification of Europe" https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/policy/from-6-to-27-members_en https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/policy/from-6... So the re-unification of Germany had many aspects too it that get overlooked.

thenaturalist 6y ago
Don't feed the trolls, I dare suggest.
- Zenst 6y ago
  How can you tell it is a troll and not some perspective without knowing the reasoning and workings out of that perspective?
rektide 6y ago
East Germany still faces incredible far ranging economic & societal difficulties after the West Germans swept in, strong armed the state, offered little support, & privatized all industry. The economy was having enormous difficulties. Rather than support & help the population, it was GDP & GDP alone that was focused on. My sources for what happened then are mostly the 4-part netflix drama The Perfect Crime, about the assassination of the Trust Agency head who paved over communism with capitalism. Not fancy, so I'm not super well versed. The movie doesn't go far into the aftermath, which, if you look at East Germany, has many of the scariest Trumpist vibes one might imagine to it. People got left the heck behind. It was a conquest not an integration. Edit: People seem to really really hate that I cited my sources and it's not good enough. Perhaps a wikipedia quote to confirm some of my stance might make you modestly less skeptical? My words are radical but the situation itself was too: > Despite these problems, the process of unification moved ahead, albeit slowly. The Treuhand, staffed almost entirely by Germans from the west, became the virtual government of eastern Germany. In the course of privatization, the agency decided which companies would live and which would die, which communities would thrive and which would shrivel, and which eastern Länder would be prosperous and which would not. It also decided who might or might not buy eastern firms or services. I'd like to find a way to hand out more credit, to be fairer, and I lack that expertise. My apologies. This was an incredibly difficult situation. Yet, it feels very much, the German "reunification" was a one way integration, was one country taking over another, with few chances at all for the German Democratic Republic government & people to try to self-determine what path forward they wanted to take towards reunification. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_German_reunification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_Germ...
- thomasz 6y ago
  > My sources are mostly the 4-part netflix drama[...] Seriously!?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - choeger 6y ago
    Still, they are correct. I can tell you from first-hand experience that this is what happened to many east Germans. Mass unemployment, deserted cities and rural areas, general loss of perspective lead to many social problems, right-wing extremism one of them. I don't think, that western Germany is solely to blame, though. If you look into the "Klassenfeind" in eastern Germany, that is entrepreneurs, bourgeoise, Christians, even just small-scale craftsman, they all did rather well after a short transition. But they did so in a very difficult environment: The masses of workers, educated to be lead by and taken care of, by the state were now completely on their own. Underqualified faced an especially dire situation: In eastern Germany even the most inept would have some payed position, even though they were completely useless there. It was basically an alternative to unemployment. Now these, say, 5% of the workforce never had been told that they should have some qualification to get some work. They simply expected some simple position to be created for them (I personally met some of these people, btw.). These people never faced a chance on the labor market.
    - inglor_cz 6y ago
      Prior to Covid, I visited former GDR several times. Places like Hoyerswerda are the worst German-speaking communities I ever saw, the spirit of hopelessness permeates everything. Even in cities like Görlitz that were restored to their original beauty, the loss of population has been so enormous that entire building blocks are empty, the windows blinded by years of dust. Ghost neighbourhoods, very untypical for Europe. Zittau on the Czech border has lost like a third of population within thirty years. Many of the remaining residents are over 70.
  - acheron 6y ago
someguydave 6y ago
no, I mean the Prussian unification was a mistake
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  Für ein Deutschland in den Grenzen von 1228 - Neapel bleibt unser!
  - someguydave 6y ago
    http://sprachlos-blog.de/westgotisches-ahnenerbe/ http://sprachlos-blog.de/westgotisches-ahnenerbe/ lol
- Zenst 6y ago
  Ah, not the first unification that springs to mind. I wasn't aware of that, and reading a bit about it and the timeline - you may be very well right. Certainly it interesting to look at how historical events panned out with hindsight and cause and effect. Whole aspect of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%80%931919 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%8... takes some getting your head around.
  - someguydave 6y ago
    I appreciate your research. As you can see from this thread, there isn't much knowledge of European history from > 40 years ago apparently.
freeflight 6y ago
> When West Germany merged with East the impact upon GDP wasn't dramatic I think actual Germans cared a bit more about things like suddenly being unemployed, in the millions, and actual economic opportunities, than the rather abstract value of GDP. And on that end unification presented quite a dramatic change for the everyday reality of many Germans, a change that's lasting to this day and wasn't actually for the better for everybody [0] [0] https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/wirtschaft/ost-west-lohndifferenz-dreissig-jahre-nach-wiedervereinigung-100.html https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/wirtschaft/ost-we...
- Barrin92 6y ago
  As one of the actual Germans let me tell you many of us do indeed care about other things than GDP numbers, for example having our families reunited, half of which for many people ended up on the other side of a wall. Many things are complicated but a regime that has to cage its own citizens in, and at times shoot them when they try to leave, is rotten to the very core. Reunification was inevitable and a good thing. Sure, major historic change causes upheaval, but it's a trivial truth that this is the case every time things change.
  - freeflight 6y ago
    As an actual German born and grown up in the West, by family that completely legally left the East, I'm no fan of these crass generalizations. I've crossed the allegedly "caged border" several times to visit family and vice versa. People tend to forget that back then border regimes, with often complex visa regulations, existed everywhere. It's not like Europe was the EU and everybody had freedom of movement except for people from the GDR. No, visas were still required over the place, borders were reinforced and heavily controlled from both sides, both sides treated you like a pseudo-criminal by completely and utterly taking your belongings apart to suppress any possible smuggling. Which was mostly down to the fact of the two Germany's also serving as a cold war border. But adding any nuance like that to these discussions is simply not allowed, the only thing allowed is equating the GDR, and the people who lived in it, with Nazi Germany at worst, at best as a bunch of people that had to be "liberated" economically and socially from the Soviets by their glorious Western saviors. A narrative that will continue to alienate a rather big part of the population, a problem that becomes slowly noticeable, but has yet to be acknowledged any more meaningful way than the usual Nazi-Keule of "Them East Germans are just neo-Nazis". > but it's a trivial truth that this is the case every time things change. The not so trivial truth is that not everything changes to the better for everybody, and in the case of "reunification" a whole lot of things changed for the worse for a whole lot of people, to this day. You can't just hand-wave that away with "Oh it was inevitable!", when the rushed and one-sided way "reunification" actually happened was absolutely not "inevitable", it was the result of Kohl's ambition to have reunification as his legacy, damned be the actual people and consequences for them.

by Zenst 6y ago

thenaturalist 6y ago

Don't feed the trolls, I dare suggest.

Zenst 6y ago
How can you tell it is a troll and not some perspective without knowing the reasoning and workings out of that perspective?

rektide 6y ago

East Germany still faces incredible far ranging economic & societal difficulties after the West Germans swept in, strong armed the state, offered little support, & privatized all industry. The economy was having enormous difficulties. Rather than support & help the population, it was GDP & GDP alone that was focused on. My sources for what happened then are mostly the 4-part netflix drama The Perfect Crime, about the assassination of the Trust Agency head who paved over communism with capitalism. Not fancy, so I'm not super well versed. The movie doesn't go far into the aftermath, which, if you look at East Germany, has many of the scariest Trumpist vibes one might imagine to it. People got left the heck behind. It was a conquest not an integration. Edit: People seem to really really hate that I cited my sources and it's not good enough. Perhaps a wikipedia quote to confirm some of my stance might make you modestly less skeptical? My words are radical but the situation itself was too: > Despite these problems, the process of unification moved ahead, albeit slowly. The Treuhand, staffed almost entirely by Germans from the west, became the virtual government of eastern Germany. In the course of privatization, the agency decided which companies would live and which would die, which communities would thrive and which would shrivel, and which eastern Länder would be prosperous and which would not. It also decided who might or might not buy eastern firms or services. I'd like to find a way to hand out more credit, to be fairer, and I lack that expertise. My apologies. This was an incredibly difficult situation. Yet, it feels very much, the German "reunification" was a one way integration, was one country taking over another, with few chances at all for the German Democratic Republic government & people to try to self-determine what path forward they wanted to take towards reunification. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_German_reunification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_Germ...

thomasz 6y ago
> My sources are mostly the 4-part netflix drama[...] Seriously!?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- choeger 6y ago
  Still, they are correct. I can tell you from first-hand experience that this is what happened to many east Germans. Mass unemployment, deserted cities and rural areas, general loss of perspective lead to many social problems, right-wing extremism one of them. I don't think, that western Germany is solely to blame, though. If you look into the "Klassenfeind" in eastern Germany, that is entrepreneurs, bourgeoise, Christians, even just small-scale craftsman, they all did rather well after a short transition. But they did so in a very difficult environment: The masses of workers, educated to be lead by and taken care of, by the state were now completely on their own. Underqualified faced an especially dire situation: In eastern Germany even the most inept would have some payed position, even though they were completely useless there. It was basically an alternative to unemployment. Now these, say, 5% of the workforce never had been told that they should have some qualification to get some work. They simply expected some simple position to be created for them (I personally met some of these people, btw.). These people never faced a chance on the labor market.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    Prior to Covid, I visited former GDR several times. Places like Hoyerswerda are the worst German-speaking communities I ever saw, the spirit of hopelessness permeates everything. Even in cities like Görlitz that were restored to their original beauty, the loss of population has been so enormous that entire building blocks are empty, the windows blinded by years of dust. Ghost neighbourhoods, very untypical for Europe. Zittau on the Czech border has lost like a third of population within thirty years. Many of the remaining residents are over 70.
- acheron 6y ago

someguydave 6y ago

no, I mean the Prussian unification was a mistake

formerly_proven 6y ago
Für ein Deutschland in den Grenzen von 1228 - Neapel bleibt unser!
- someguydave 6y ago
  http://sprachlos-blog.de/westgotisches-ahnenerbe/ http://sprachlos-blog.de/westgotisches-ahnenerbe/ lol
Zenst 6y ago
Ah, not the first unification that springs to mind. I wasn't aware of that, and reading a bit about it and the timeline - you may be very well right. Certainly it interesting to look at how historical events panned out with hindsight and cause and effect. Whole aspect of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%80%931919 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Revolution_of_1918%E2%8... takes some getting your head around.
- someguydave 6y ago
  I appreciate your research. As you can see from this thread, there isn't much knowledge of European history from > 40 years ago apparently.

freeflight 6y ago

> When West Germany merged with East the impact upon GDP wasn't dramatic I think actual Germans cared a bit more about things like suddenly being unemployed, in the millions, and actual economic opportunities, than the rather abstract value of GDP. And on that end unification presented quite a dramatic change for the everyday reality of many Germans, a change that's lasting to this day and wasn't actually for the better for everybody [0] [0] https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/wirtschaft/ost-west-lohndifferenz-dreissig-jahre-nach-wiedervereinigung-100.html https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/wirtschaft/ost-we...

Barrin92 6y ago
As one of the actual Germans let me tell you many of us do indeed care about other things than GDP numbers, for example having our families reunited, half of which for many people ended up on the other side of a wall. Many things are complicated but a regime that has to cage its own citizens in, and at times shoot them when they try to leave, is rotten to the very core. Reunification was inevitable and a good thing. Sure, major historic change causes upheaval, but it's a trivial truth that this is the case every time things change.
- freeflight 6y ago
  As an actual German born and grown up in the West, by family that completely legally left the East, I'm no fan of these crass generalizations. I've crossed the allegedly "caged border" several times to visit family and vice versa. People tend to forget that back then border regimes, with often complex visa regulations, existed everywhere. It's not like Europe was the EU and everybody had freedom of movement except for people from the GDR. No, visas were still required over the place, borders were reinforced and heavily controlled from both sides, both sides treated you like a pseudo-criminal by completely and utterly taking your belongings apart to suppress any possible smuggling. Which was mostly down to the fact of the two Germany's also serving as a cold war border. But adding any nuance like that to these discussions is simply not allowed, the only thing allowed is equating the GDR, and the people who lived in it, with Nazi Germany at worst, at best as a bunch of people that had to be "liberated" economically and socially from the Soviets by their glorious Western saviors. A narrative that will continue to alienate a rather big part of the population, a problem that becomes slowly noticeable, but has yet to be acknowledged any more meaningful way than the usual Nazi-Keule of "Them East Germans are just neo-Nazis". > but it's a trivial truth that this is the case every time things change. The not so trivial truth is that not everything changes to the better for everybody, and in the case of "reunification" a whole lot of things changed for the worse for a whole lot of people, to this day. You can't just hand-wave that away with "Oh it was inevitable!", when the rushed and one-sided way "reunification" actually happened was absolutely not "inevitable", it was the result of Kohl's ambition to have reunification as his legacy, damned be the actual people and consequences for them.