Page 34 - BNE_magazine_12_2019 dec19

34 I 30 Years of transition bne December 2019
Even to this day my German friends say they can tell who is a Wessi and who a Ossi fairly easily, although the differences are lost on me.
This difference has also translated into the politics. I have spent most of the last three decades moving backwards and forwards between Moscow and Berlin, my two homes. By 2003 the decade of integration was complete and everyone had established new lives, but this period was marked by the rise of “Ostalgie” where the TV was full of DDR-era movies and the stars and singers from those days on that side of the wall were enjoying a revival in popularity. The genre was summed up in an excellent and funny film called “Goodbye Lenin!” with Daniel Brühl, who has gone on to become a international movie star.
The Ossis missed the certitudes of socialism, the “cradle to the grave” care the state offered and the camaraderie that was part of the socialist system
– something they share with all the peoples from the former socialist
block to varying degrees. The point is that not everything in East Germany was bad and there were many
things that the Ossis missed, despite being materially better off now.
Vladimir Kaminer, a Jewish Russian author, became famous in Germany with
www.bne.eu
his short stories written in German about his life in Russia, the most famous being “Russendisko” about the chaos of the reunification. He moved to East Berlin before the fall and now runs the Burger Bar (Burger means citizen in German and has nothing to do with hamburgers) that has been a smash hit with Berlin's cool youth, playing crappy Russian
pop music and serving cheap vodka.
“East Berlin was full of dissidents in those days who were pissed off with the system, but for me coming from Russia, East Berlin was like a paradise,” Kaminer
car above all else) were expensive. As time wore on a disillusionment appeared as the promise of the west remained
a promise unless you made a lot of money. And not everyone made
a lot of money. Most just got by.
The concept of democracy came to mean something slightly different to the Ossis. To westerners, democracy means the right to vote, a free press and control over your life choices. The hard work and competitive nature of capitalism is taken as a given, but for East Germans
it was new and after a decade many of them decided they didn't really like it.
In the noughties this was manifest by the rise of the left-wing parties such
as Die Linke and Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), which became more popular in the eastern part of the country. Today the same disillusionment is fuelling the rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) right-wing nationalist party that is also popular in the east
and poorer parts of the country, although the return of neo-fascist politics is a lot more complicated than just the problems associated with the unification of Germany.
As bne IntelliNews recently reported in a piece “Decline of the west and rise of the rest”, disillusionment with the capitalist model has now spread to the
“East Berlin was full of dissidents in those days who were pissed off with the system, but for me coming from Russia, East Berlin was like
a paradise”
told bne IntelliNews in an interview at the Burger Bar. “The shops were full of fresh produce we could only dream about in Russia. It was like the social model worked in East Germany and nowhere else in the Soviet Union.”
Of course the quality and variety of the goods on offer to West Germans were vastly superior, but they had to be paid for. Everything had to be paid for. And many of the things people desired (a nice
west as the perpetual economic growth promise at the base of this model has proven to be impossible to deliver on,
as the world runs up against its climatic and social limitations. Average incomes amongst the middle class stopped growing at the end of the 70s and have been in decline since, as inequalities across the developed world get wider. The rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer, not just in the emerging markets of Eastern Europe, but everywhere.