With Putin talking about the orthodox church being holy and using to justify some conservative bullshit, all I can remember was the bolsheviks going around the country proudly declaring that cities were now "officially godless" and redistributing the church's gold amongst the people and using it to pay for electrification projects.
Thank you for sharing, I love learning about the DDR. Stasi State or Socialist Paradise is pretty high on my list of books to read next.
It's still a bit of a heated subject here. I'm old enough to remember the wall coming down, but i grew up in the west, so i always only knew the western side of the story, which was full of horseshoe theory, vuvuzela no iphone (our equivalent is "DDR no banana", as imported fruit where often hard to get there) and resentment about the partition. Then when i got older, i met a ton of people from the east (both from the DDR and a bunch of other formerly AES countries) and the common theme was usually "yes, it was bad ... it was a dictatorship and i didn't want that system any longer, BUT ..." The east had it really rough after the reunification. It wasn't as harsh as in Russia, but 80% of the people there lost their jobs, entire industries got bought up for nothing by companies from the west, and while the stores were suddenly full of consumer goods that people had always yearned for, they had no money to buy them with. There's a lot of very deep resentment of capitalism among easterners and while there's historic reasons why nazis are a really serious problem there, it's also the part of the country where leftist politicians are still most successful. People there often don't buy into the narratives of liberal democracy, one way or the other. There's a lot of small differences like that. A historic case of one society being split in two and then both halves developing independently under totally different material conditions and a totally different ruling ideology.
This is a good perspective to hear. Like, so much of what the west said about the DDR was bullshit. But at the same time, I also want to be fair and not pretend it was a workers paradise and everyone was just tricked into wanting capitalism.
There was no going back after the USA flooded East Germany with capital. In From Us To Me the co-op fisherman made a great point that if the GDR managed to create an exchange program wherein young people were forced/allowed to live under capitalism for a while (working min wage in Mexico or something) they would never have wanted the wall to come down.
People fell for the Propaganda and wanted to try it, but there was no going back once the Vanguard fell and capital was allowed to reign freely.