the right-wing coups of 1989 were an unmitigated disaster for the world
The Proles Pod episode of Life in the GDR is incredible and just shows how much the west fucked everything up to try and combat the Soviets. Life in GDR sounded amazing
I highly recommend Stasi State or Socialist Paradise by Bruni de la Motte. It's all very good and an easy read. The section on "reunification" (anschluss would be more appropriate...) is an absolute horror show. Successful, productive enterprises were bought for pennies on the dollar and then shut down by western competitors and the workers left with nothing. Municipalities were suddenly saddled with billions of marks of debt out of nowhere because the GDR's way financing local development didn't really match up with capitalism. People who lived in their homes for decades were thrown out if someone in West Germany could show they owned it before the war. And the large landowners were allowed to buy up their ancestral manors for like 40 cents on the dollar. And a lot more, that's just what I recall off the top of my head.
Yep, de la Motte goes into detail about how this wasn't true, the GDR had some enterprises that were global leaders, like in shipbuilding and optics. Sure, some businesses probably weren't the best because the GDR could really only trade with other communist countries so a certain amount of self-reliance was necessary. But the notion that their entire economy was rotten is patently false.
I seem to recall Trabants were as good as any car in the FRG, but there was another brand of car in the GDR, a step below the Trabant, that really was kinda shit. But tbf they were trying to make cars for everyone and at that time in places like the UK and France, there were plenty of now-defunct car companies that made shit cars, too. It was pretty typical of the car industry globally at that time.
And I also want to quality, I'm just an American who reads about stuff. I could definitely be wrong on some things here.
I went to the Trabant museum in Chemnitz once. It was pretty cool. They had displays set up with little vignettes of GDR life, like camping, etc. Too bad it's not a good idea to post the picture of myself "driving" a Trabant. I'm still not totally sure it was OK for me to get in the car at the museum, but my friend was a local and was like, get in, get in, I'll take your picture!
Most cars made in East Germany (and for that matter, the Soviet Union) were made cheap, and if you compare them to Western cars at a similar price point they're of comparable quality. But since a communist car has to be imported its price gets inflated and it ends up getting compared to cars that cost two or three times as much money to make - of course it's going to come out looking bad.
The Trabant really was kinda shit. I think you confuse it with the Wartburg, which was an updated 30s DKW. Decent car but really old school. The Trabant was more like a moped car.
They did have the distinct advantage of certifiably not having built genocide ovens for the Nazis, something the West German corps can't say.
Yes, that's Helmut Kohl, the monolith of corruption, racism and anticommunism who annexed the DDR with the same fury as he annexed his favorite meal, stuffed pork stomach.
I'm about to go Defcon 3 on the horn dogs in this thread, bad Hexbears bad! :spray-bottle: :spray-bottle: :spray-bottle:
