8 ms·

Odd/amusing point, the Stasi referred to the wall as the "antifascist defense border". Although these days, I'm a bit torn on the term as I see rent prices jac

Odd/amusing point, the Stasi referred to the wall as the "antifascist defense border". Although these days, I'm a bit torn on the term as I see rent prices jacked up across the world by whomever can borrow money at the lowest rate. The Stasi and the Berlin Wall | DW Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haxkWC6MgcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haxkWC6MgcQ

inglor_cz 5y ago
I suspect that real estate prices are dragged up by fear of inflation. People in my country buy whatever has a roof, because they do not want their savings to go to waste.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  It’s all about the cheap money. I just refinanced my house for a rate that is effectively negative in real terms right now.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    We had even slightly lower interest rate on mortgages in 2017 and the market was nowhere as hot as today. I am sort-of familiar with real estate market in Prague and Ostrava, two very different cities. Apartments in Ostrava were hard to sell even with low interest rates, because the city lost 10 per cent of its population - a typical rust belt phenomenon. Even just two years ago, an apartment put on market in Ostrava could be there for half a year before attracting a serious buyer. They are now hot like hell and more than twice as much expensive.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    Agreed. Some people/institutions have access to more money than can be productively used so they bid up anything that has the potential to make money, be it startups, Bitcoin or housing.
- adsche 5y ago
  Is the real estate market (esp. for renting out) actually dominated by private investors and their savings? Here in German cities, it feels like it's dominated by faceless investors and corporations but I have no data to back that up.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    In March-May 2021, I was looking for an apartment or smaller house in my city of birth, Ostrava. The market was crazy, but the prospective buyers looked like regular people. Sometimes 15-20 of us met in a single location and had to be shepherded through the dwelling in groups.
  - f6v 5y ago
    99.99% for-rent apartments I’ve seen in Western Europe were owned by some huge company. That’s a stark contrast to Eastern Europe where you’re much more likely to rent a privately owned property.
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      How many of those are actually privately owned but are only managed by the big bad corporation? It is often very hard to tell the difference.
    - buran77 5y ago
      This may be because of local laws or city council rules. In many cities the developer of a complex today is forced by law to have a certain percentage of the development dedicated for rental (Munich I think may be the leader here with a proposed 80% for rental). The only way to achieve this is to have the apartments owned by the developer or handed over to another management company (or investor) for rental only. It's also why you sometimes see a development with a several rows of houses meant for sale flanked by one or more apartment buildings with a far smaller footprint but enough floors to equal roughly the same usable area in order to get the project approved.
      - johannes1234321 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
pydry 5y ago
IIRC west germany did end up welcoming some nazis back into government positions so from their standpoint it probably seemed fairly reasonable. There were still Nazis everywhere in postwar berlin.
- sdoering 5y ago
  They did. Same with the US inviting Third Reich scientists. Or BND, CIA, MI5 and others inviting HVA (Stasi foreign spy agency) people into their ranks. What, except maybe that states are immoral and opportunistic, does these things tell us? I am not sure. Maybe I am missing net positive things as outcomes from these behaviors. But to me neither example is good.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Using those scientists to made the bomb to end the war was one positive outcome.
    - evanb 5y ago
      The Operation Paperclip scientists helped build rockets for the post-war era. Not bombs. The German / Austrian / Hungarian scientists that worked on the bomb came to the US years before the Manhattan project started.
    - sdoering 5y ago
      The idea that the bombs on Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki shortened the war in a significant way is in historic sciences at least contested. I remember my professor at University arguing against the fact that this idea was presented as proven fact, when there were many question in the scientific community. Not sure how maybe newer evidence might have changed it. I would need to dive into the actual scientific literature to update my knowledge of the topic.
- heraclius 5y ago
  In that were the real concern, the DDR would have restricted travel from the West to the East by residents of the West, but not travel by its own residents to the West and return journeys—yet it prohibited the latter. Moreover the DDR cannot seriously have had such concerns, since it too e.g. employed former Nazi officers in its army.
aerosmile 5y ago
The Russians' usage of the term antifascist certainly didn't age well, but it's worth noting that "fascists" is how all people in the world referred to certain Germans and Italians for a period of 25 years all up until 1945 (and the affected folks didn't mind that - in fact, the term was invented in Italy in 1915 and then adopted by Mussolini in 1918 and by Hitler in 1923 [0]). So for Russians to refer to Germans who didn't join them as fascists is just a continuation of how the term had been used for a long time. By 1961, it was definitely unfair to continue using the term in its original meaning, and at this point it was certainly the Russian government pushing their agenda a lot more strongly than the general population would have on its own. But it's not like everyone was strictly opposed to it either - the horrors of the war had created in Eastern Europe such deep resentment towards Germany that it would take a lot more than 16 years to get over that. In fact, my grandpa lived until the 90s and still called every German a fascist. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
- fsckboy 5y ago
  > the term antifascist certainly didn't age well antifa? the political left has never stopped using the term fascist as a pejorative, it's thrown around quite liberally even today
  - f6v 5y ago
    Sometimes I get lost in public discussions these days. Everyone is “fascist”, “far-right”, and “leftist” at the same time.
    - aerosmile 5y ago
      Far-left and far-right ideologies have more in common than many people realize (including the people within those factions). They are both based on the principle on low tolerance, and as such they are well-aligned on the idea of strict enforcement of their ideologies. There are some hilarious misconceptions that members of those factions have about their own ideologies. Far-left is against the police brutality, but there is a 100 year history of perfect correlation between leftist regimes and policy brutality. Far-right is against government interventions in all economic matters, but that also has never materialized anywhere else. The bottom line is that anything that's far-something requires suppression of the society's natural tendency to return to the center.
ArtWomb 5y ago
Highest recommendation for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's film The Lives of Others (2006) ;)

inglor_cz 5y ago

I suspect that real estate prices are dragged up by fear of inflation. People in my country buy whatever has a roof, because they do not want their savings to go to waste.

Spooky23 5y ago
It’s all about the cheap money. I just refinanced my house for a rate that is effectively negative in real terms right now.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  We had even slightly lower interest rate on mortgages in 2017 and the market was nowhere as hot as today. I am sort-of familiar with real estate market in Prague and Ostrava, two very different cities. Apartments in Ostrava were hard to sell even with low interest rates, because the city lost 10 per cent of its population - a typical rust belt phenomenon. Even just two years ago, an apartment put on market in Ostrava could be there for half a year before attracting a serious buyer. They are now hot like hell and more than twice as much expensive.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  Agreed. Some people/institutions have access to more money than can be productively used so they bid up anything that has the potential to make money, be it startups, Bitcoin or housing.
adsche 5y ago
Is the real estate market (esp. for renting out) actually dominated by private investors and their savings? Here in German cities, it feels like it's dominated by faceless investors and corporations but I have no data to back that up.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  In March-May 2021, I was looking for an apartment or smaller house in my city of birth, Ostrava. The market was crazy, but the prospective buyers looked like regular people. Sometimes 15-20 of us met in a single location and had to be shepherded through the dwelling in groups.
- f6v 5y ago
  99.99% for-rent apartments I’ve seen in Western Europe were owned by some huge company. That’s a stark contrast to Eastern Europe where you’re much more likely to rent a privately owned property.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    How many of those are actually privately owned but are only managed by the big bad corporation? It is often very hard to tell the difference.
  - buran77 5y ago
    This may be because of local laws or city council rules. In many cities the developer of a complex today is forced by law to have a certain percentage of the development dedicated for rental (Munich I think may be the leader here with a proposed 80% for rental). The only way to achieve this is to have the apartments owned by the developer or handed over to another management company (or investor) for rental only. It's also why you sometimes see a development with a several rows of houses meant for sale flanked by one or more apartment buildings with a far smaller footprint but enough floors to equal roughly the same usable area in order to get the project approved.
    - johannes1234321 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

pydry 5y ago

IIRC west germany did end up welcoming some nazis back into government positions so from their standpoint it probably seemed fairly reasonable. There were still Nazis everywhere in postwar berlin.

sdoering 5y ago
They did. Same with the US inviting Third Reich scientists. Or BND, CIA, MI5 and others inviting HVA (Stasi foreign spy agency) people into their ranks. What, except maybe that states are immoral and opportunistic, does these things tell us? I am not sure. Maybe I am missing net positive things as outcomes from these behaviors. But to me neither example is good.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Using those scientists to made the bomb to end the war was one positive outcome.
  - evanb 5y ago
    The Operation Paperclip scientists helped build rockets for the post-war era. Not bombs. The German / Austrian / Hungarian scientists that worked on the bomb came to the US years before the Manhattan project started.
  - sdoering 5y ago
    The idea that the bombs on Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki shortened the war in a significant way is in historic sciences at least contested. I remember my professor at University arguing against the fact that this idea was presented as proven fact, when there were many question in the scientific community. Not sure how maybe newer evidence might have changed it. I would need to dive into the actual scientific literature to update my knowledge of the topic.
heraclius 5y ago
In that were the real concern, the DDR would have restricted travel from the West to the East by residents of the West, but not travel by its own residents to the West and return journeys—yet it prohibited the latter. Moreover the DDR cannot seriously have had such concerns, since it too e.g. employed former Nazi officers in its army.

aerosmile 5y ago

The Russians' usage of the term antifascist certainly didn't age well, but it's worth noting that "fascists" is how all people in the world referred to certain Germans and Italians for a period of 25 years all up until 1945 (and the affected folks didn't mind that - in fact, the term was invented in Italy in 1915 and then adopted by Mussolini in 1918 and by Hitler in 1923 [0]). So for Russians to refer to Germans who didn't join them as fascists is just a continuation of how the term had been used for a long time. By 1961, it was definitely unfair to continue using the term in its original meaning, and at this point it was certainly the Russian government pushing their agenda a lot more strongly than the general population would have on its own. But it's not like everyone was strictly opposed to it either - the horrors of the war had created in Eastern Europe such deep resentment towards Germany that it would take a lot more than 16 years to get over that. In fact, my grandpa lived until the 90s and still called every German a fascist. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

fsckboy 5y ago
> the term antifascist certainly didn't age well antifa? the political left has never stopped using the term fascist as a pejorative, it's thrown around quite liberally even today
- f6v 5y ago
  Sometimes I get lost in public discussions these days. Everyone is “fascist”, “far-right”, and “leftist” at the same time.
  - aerosmile 5y ago
    Far-left and far-right ideologies have more in common than many people realize (including the people within those factions). They are both based on the principle on low tolerance, and as such they are well-aligned on the idea of strict enforcement of their ideologies. There are some hilarious misconceptions that members of those factions have about their own ideologies. Far-left is against the police brutality, but there is a 100 year history of perfect correlation between leftist regimes and policy brutality. Far-right is against government interventions in all economic matters, but that also has never materialized anywhere else. The bottom line is that anything that's far-something requires suppression of the society's natural tendency to return to the center.

ArtWomb 5y ago

Highest recommendation for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's film The Lives of Others (2006) ;)