As beautiful in aesthetics as it was in the ideals it represented...
The GDR being forcibly integrated into the west is one of the greatest crimes in history
Yes. Reading a book about the GDR now (Stasi State or Socialist Paradise) and I just get kinda angry at what happened, and how deeply I was propagandized to as a little kid when the GDR was still around (and still to this day ofc).
Strangely nobody knows the name of the FRG’s secret police which functioned simultaneously as a CIA and FBI.
The BND headquarters is located in central Berlin and is the world's largest intelligence headquarters.
Oh, how weird. They must have inherited that from the Stasi or something!
Just to be clear:
The new BND headquarters in Berlin, near the former Berlin Wall, was completed in 2017. At the official opening in February 2019, Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, made this statement: "In an often very confusing world, now, more urgently than ever, Germany needs a strong and efficient foreign intelligence service". At the time, some 4,000 employees were expected to work from this location, moving here from the former headquarters in Pullach, a suburb of Munich.[50] The agency's total number of employees, in Germany and other countries, was approximately 6,500.[51]
Surprising what a bunch of former nazi spies have grown into. That's how the BND started out, they were the division Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East), the part of Hitler's secret services tasked with spying on the Soviet Union. And after the war, the USA found that so useful that they went "yeah, keep up the good work."
They weren't conquered...
In the first free GDR elections the conservative CDU got over 40% of the vote the PDS (the former SED) only 16%. They might not have known what capitalism had in stall for them, but they knew that did not want a continuation of the GDR. After Hungary opened it's border to the west about 35000 citizens fled to the West in a couple of days. After that the GDR regime didn't allow any more travel to Hungary. Now people fled to the embassy's of west Germany in the CSSR. You can clearly see that it was mostly working class people who wanted the leave thr GDR whatever the cost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJWzXUGeUVM
The GDR existed because soviet tanks guaranteed it. It stopped existing when the soviet tanks withdraw because of Gorbatschow. It was a failed experiment. Ulbricht himself said that socialism must defeat capitalism by being more productive than capitalism. But the citizans of the GDR were well aware that the exploited workers in the west had access to more and better consumer goods than them. The eastern block states knew how to build an externsive heavy industry, because that is something you can brute force, but the light industry (and usually the agrarian sector) sucked. A good economy needs a unit to measure productivity it also needs a good flow of information. In capitalism the unit is money (profit) the most productive companies can make an extra profit and this actually does drive innovation. The information flow is half assed through markets and could be much better, but we all know capitalism is bad. In socialism the unit of measurement would be time, the more economically advanced the production is the less time will go into the production of a given product. Yet the eastern block enonomies never established this "economy of time" (Marx). They kept the value form, commodity production and often buisnesses were expected to generate a profit for the state. However they were doing this mostly without private property or markets. This chimera of capitalism (commodity production, money as universal mean of exchange) , socialism (public property and a planned economy) and a command economy (strong centralized beraucracy, making even minor decisions at will and enforcing them through violence if necessary) was even more contradictory than capitalism itself and broke apart under it's own contradictions.
This isn't meant to take away from the the good they did, but as scientific socialists it's important to understand why they failed and it isn't important to posthumously justify them or fall to nostalgia, larping for a country that stopped existing before most people on this site were born.
This is very insightful. I know it's easy to fall back on "well folks in the eastern bloc were tricked into wanting capitalism" and there's some truth to it, but we only hurt ourselves and the future of socialism if we don't acknowledge failures of the past.
Where does Marx talk about an economy of time? I want to read more about that.
But after re-unification, a huge amount of people changed their minds. They saw the looting taking place under treuhand and realized that they were fed even worse lies by the unification conservatives than by the party.
Lots of the party members were then locked up or stripped of the ability to participate in state affairs after the first elections and the door was sealed behind them.
All I was ever taught about the DDR is that it was a hell-scape people could not escape or be shot. So what's the reality? I know so little about it.
EDIT: damn, the wiki is literally just "COMMUNISM BAD EVERYONE HUNGRY. NO CAR. WEST GERMANY GOOD"
EDIT EDIT: Omg I'm reading the discussion. It's even worse. "We should rename the page to East Germany because... Well, we just like it better"
This podcast episode was pivotal to changing my understanding of the DDR.
The DDR voted on their constitution. The BRD's was written for them by Western powers.
Workers in the DDR had the right to fire their boss. The state devoted resources and attention to making workplaces psychologically beneficial and less stressful.
Students had the right to learn any trade they wished. If enough students wanted to learn something, they could demand that guildsmen come to the school and teach them.
Women had the right to divorce a man for holding back her career, or in the words of one of the podcast hosts, "the right to yeet a whole-ass man". They had equality in the same era that domestic abuse was legal in America. The book about women having better sex under socialism was based on the DDR.
Vacation and childcare
benefitsrights were some of the best to ever exist.IMO they got about as close to achieving actual socialism as anyone. Some of the best childcare in the world. Pay differentials between the highest and lowest paid workers were only like 3:1. Some pretty incredible workplace democracy. In many respects their liberation of women was better than what we have in the US today. Not perfect by any stretch but nothing like what has been made out by the west. The protests in the late 80s sought out reform and a better system but were not looking to replace socialism with capitalism.
Some pretty incredible workplace democracy.
Yet when West German liberals hear that a clear majority of people from the East feel just as or even less free than in the DDR, they automatically assume these must be nazis crying about muh freeze peach.
In many respects their liberation of women was better than what we have in the US today
Call me one aspect which is better in the US than was back then for women in the DDR.
I mean honestly I can't, I was just hedging some. I guess abortion was legalized around the same time in both countries, so that's a push. I don't know what % of senators and reps in the US congress are women today, so I don't know if that's better now that it was in the GDR in the 80s... but I know in the 80s it was much lower in the US than in the GDR.
GDR actually passed gender quotas for mayoral offices because too many women were winning.
people could not escape or be shot
People who died at the inner-German border in the 40 years the DDR existed: about 800 People who died at the outer borders of the EU since the German reunification: about 32.000 and counting
Yet one is supposedly equivalent to the nazis and the other is supposedly a wellspring of freedom and equality.
That's not to say everything was cool about the DDR. It was, in many ways, still incredibly ... well, German. I've met a lot of people old enough to remember life in the DDR over the years, and their usual takeaway is "Well yeah, it was a dictatorship and it sucked, BUT ..." People wanted reforms, wanted more freedoms, but most didn't want to just be annexed by a capitalist system. Many hoped that the reunification would include a referendum about a new German constitution, one that granted them the benefits of already existing socialism without the downsides that come with a socialist system existing in a state of constant siege.
Over the decades the Berlin Wall stood, about 140 people were killed trying to cross it. Not great but still, not what you would think listening to US propaganda. For example, in the movie Bridge of Spies which only came out a few years ago, Tom Hanks is in a train going from West Berlin to East Berlin (or vice versa, don't remember). In the 3-4 seconds the train crosses over the wall, he just happens to see someone trying to cross and get shot. Now the odds that Hanks would see one of maybe 4 or 5 people shot that year at the wall... probably better odds of getting struck by lightning. But the way the movie portrays it, you end up thinking it must be like a normal thing.
Talking bout Trams, the local tram company was split in east and west afer WW2 for obvious reasons, but they kept servicing the same lines and also crossed the border (because no iron curtain then).
This stopped in 1950 as the eastern division employed female drivers and the western division was not okay with this, so the lines stopped at the border, you switched to an identical train on the identical line and then went on.
And then the west started dismantling tram lines so now west-berlin as 3 and east-berlin has 19.
The DDR made plenty of mistakes, but most of those were the consequence of being a military occupation. Unfortunately, the people of the DDR never got a chance to build Socialism for themselves in the early days and the friction between Soviet models of socialism and ones more suited to Germany's material conditions was pretty substantial
Unlike the West, the DDR suppressed the Nazi's instead of offering them jobs, and the Stasi and the controls on public life are a consequence of that. By the time the threat subsided, the Cold War was in full swing and those occupation institutions were the easiest way to solve the issue.
But ultimately, the DDR is the closest thing we have to Marx being proved right, that a revolution in an industrialised society could represent a great leap forwards from capitalist relations.
Fully agree. Like all AES states, the DDR was also shaped by a state of siege, and that was particularly pronounced due to being a frontline state in the Cold War, coming with threats such as one of the world's absolute hotbeds of spy activity in Berlin, being the designated staging ground for the opening moves of WW3, or a constant propagandistic onslaught of incredibly hostile BRD media, which were able to broadcast across almost the entire DDR territory. It's unbelievable how vitriolic west German anticommunism was, i think we're one of the few continental western European nations that already rivaled the US in that regard even before capitalist realism choked any meaningful dissent in the imperialist core.
So there was an unbelievable amount of pressure on the DDR from the very start and i think that contributed a lot to the need to supress dissent. "Divided" Germany was such a weird place. I still grew up with the notion that there's this alternate universe version of my country, people a bit older than me grew up with the perspective of having to fight a war against their own relatives in the east.
It was, in many ways, still incredibly … well, German.
The DDR was so powerful it managed to spread laziness, poverty, and hideously poor engineering in a country populated entirely by Germans.
How did you double the value of a Trabant? Fill the gas tank!
Also the GDR was pretty pro gay for its time, even ruling
homosexuality, just like heterosexuality, represents a variant of sexual behavior. Homosexual people do therefore not stand outside socialist society, and the civil rights are warranted to them exactly as to all other citizens
There's this weird revisionism around that topic where people pretend like West Germany was better on gay rights because thousands of people were dying of AIDS there and the government wasn't doing anything about it.
Meanwhile there wasn't a lot of stuff about AIDS coming out if the GDR so they all said that the GDR was suppressing homosexuals when in reality they just had a better public health system and not as many people were getting AIDS there.
Basically the "Chyna is lying about their Covid numbers because they love killing people" shit we have today.
I like all the variations of the hammer and sickle iconography. East Germany's and the DPRK look pretty cool, but kinda outdated I guess. Any ideas as to what a more modern one would look like?
I know it's cringe to quote paradox map game, but I'm a fan of Zhdanov's Soviet Federation flag from TNO. Has that FALGSC feel.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21st_Waffen_Mountain_Division_of_the_SS_Skanderbeg
The only good version of that flag is the one with the gold star above the head.
SU knew how to make some pretty flags. take a look at Belarus's flag
now look at the ugly thing that local fascist color revolutionaries want to replace it with. it looks like england without the second stripe
spoiler
the white and red flag is Belarus's historical flag, before turning into an SSR. but still doesnt change the fact that the only people intrested in changing it are anti-communists
