“We never worried about not having a place to live or a job, or about being evicted. There were no worries or fears about our livelihoods and there was so much in the way of culture and recreation that was available most of the time at little or no cost.”
She said that “attempts were always made not only that you had a job but that it was the best job you could do and whenever possible a job you really liked.”
Zastrow explained that she disliked the technical aspects of her schooling, despite the fact that they were providing her with skills that were quite useable. “I love animals,” she said, “and really wanted to have a career working with them.” She described how “there were needs for everything in the GDR, for people who could do all kinds of things and they worked to get me a job that I loved, a job on a large agricultural dairy collective where I had such good times working with more than 300 cows!”
Ad now a lot of them are aggressively racists and AfD keeps winning eastern states. Seeing your country gutted by capitalists and turning around and saying "actually it's the Turkish and Syrian people down the street's fault"
If you look at votes by demographic all the people that would have actual memories of the GDR vote a lot more moderate than all the people that were brought up in the 90s
That's exactly the problem though. Capitalists can simply claim they're on the proles' side because they are Germans too. It's that depressingly easy. Just feed people nationalism.
Yup. There's a (lib) theatre group that did an experiment in Estonia, where they made a fake political party that had no policies, promises, or even political history... just beyond parody nationalist performativity and 'pretty' looking politicians.
They went from nothing at all in politics to polling at 25% of the vote at one point.
https://youtu.be/lSGnsZlELbw?si=zrH_sSo59npJIqYw
Propaganda is a hell of a drug.