Reportage
Promises to East Germany are cheap – but breaking them may not be
‘We will give jobs to tens of thousands of unemployed East Germans, especially young people,’ Scholz said. Few believe it.
The latest promise of the government of the wessi (West Germans) to the ossi (East Germans) to transform the industrial wasteland of the former GDR into “a blooming landscape where it will be good to live and work” (Helmut Kohl’s reassuring words from July 1, 1990) was the plant to build latest-generation microchips for the giant Infineon, in demand all over the world.
Even though Finance Minister Christian Lindner has taken a hatchet to the federal budget, the full 5 billion euros were still found for building the factory near Dresden, the capital of Saxony. The required green light from Brussels for this obvious state subsidy for private industry finally came on August 20: just in time for elections in Saxony and Thuringia.
“We will give jobs to tens of thousands of unemployed East Germans, especially young people,” was the Scholz government's confident-sounding message as it touted this new wonder plan for raising the living conditions of East Germans, which have remained unchanged over the decades despite all the hyped-up game-changers.
The great disappointment
On the eve of the vote that would change the face of East Germany (and not only), the failure of all of Berlin's promises could be summed up by the implausible-looking per-capita income numbers: 35 years after the liquidation of the GDR, the richest Land in the East is still light-years behind the poorest one in the West.
In effect, everything here has remained the same as before. Nothing new since Kohl's Reconstruction (which was only able to enrich the West's businesses); no progress since the years of Schröder Agenda, the Social Democrat who supposedly made the East rife with work opportunities, but in the form of mini-jobs. Nothing of note from the two decades of Merkel, even though she was “the girl from the East” who grew up in Templin, in the heart of “real socialism.” Same with the green turn promoted by the “semaphore” alliance of Social Democrats, liberals and greens, which was immediately dismissed as mere window dressing, especially in Thuringia: for the average citizen in Germany's most agricultural state, it brought almost nothing except the requirement to change their cars and boilers and pay twice as much for diesel for their tractors.
It doesn’t look like anything can be done about it. In 2024, the “two Germanies” still look as far apart as they did during the Cold War. The difference being that nowadays, the ossi can no longer count on help from the Russians, which until two years ago meant a direct spillover benefit to the economies of the eastern states from the large-scale industry built around the flow of the German Gazprom and Rosneft pipelines.
That would be the latest of Berlin's broken promises: when the Nordstream 2 was built, wanted by the SPD and blessed by Merkel, the federal government had assured that the “brotherhood pipeline” would guarantee “jobs and peace in Europe.”
Both jobs and peace were gone after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while the energy bills for the eastern former GDR Länder, which used to be extraordinarily low thanks to the joint venture directly sponsored by the SPD government of Mecklenburg-Pomerania, went sky-high six months later after the sabotage of the pipeline under the Baltic Sea.
It’s no wonder that in the East, almost no one is willing at this point to believe the words of those representing the institutions. This is the recurring theme confirmed by the analyses of the most authoritative sociologists, as well as by my chats with the “little people” I’ve personally encountered in the countryside straddling Thuringia and Saxony (the “kleine leute,” an expression that has become current after it used to be exclusive to the fascist-populists fixated on propaganda about the oppressed and defenseless volk).
“I believed everyone. At first, I was a Communist, as long as they defended labor. Then a Christian Democrat, when the CDU was protecting savings and focusing on the family. Now I will vote for Sahra Wagenknecht, even though she’s a wessi, just because I’m not right-wing. … If the AfD had run someone else instead of that ‘Nazi’ Bjorn Höcke, I would have considered them,” says Heinz Engelman, 68, an asparagus farmer. He sums everything up with the number that by itself explains his entire political journey: ”My pension is 70 percent of that of someone like me in Munich, Hanover or Cologne. Do we really live in the same country?”
Any remaining trust in central power is gone, no matter who its embodiment may be. Nonetheless, East Germans continue to respond – and eagerly so – to the siren call of those at the local level who seem able to, if not solve, at least understand the mix of disappointment and anger at being relegated to second-class Germans in terms of wages and pensions, as well as when it comes to the crucial options for accessing continuing vocational training.
In Thuringia, until a short while ago, the majority of voters had believed to the core in Die Linke's small-but-grand revolution, with current governor Bodo Ramelow twice re-elected with strong popular support on the back of a program of “social-communist reforms.” On Sunday, however, after the vote count in Erfurt, the surge of the AfD and Sahra Wagenknecht wiped away the extraordinary period of the red-red-green coalition that was built just a short while before the centrist turn of both the SPD and Greens.
And so, within a single generation, the East Germans will see the political party scene change yet again. From red sunset to black dawn – just like a century ago.
The revenge of history
Forty-eight months after Lenin's revolution, Thuringia was already the red stronghold of the newly established Weimar Republic. In 1923, a red-red coalition arose between the socialists of the SPD, then internationalists, and the Communists of the KPD. Just a few years later, in the elections of 1932, the Nazis of the NSDAP would triumph in Erfurt with 43 percent of the vote, just before they would seize power at the national level. Erfurt was where the NSDAP had held its first congress in 1926, in the very capital of socialism, which at the time had not become entangled with the virus of nationalism.
How could this happen in the land of factory councils, in the model region of the labor movement that was able to introduce social changes never before seen in Thuringia, starting with the veto on the corporal punishment of students? If we read the accounts of those who crossed over to the other side of the barricade as recorded in the historical documents, it’s possible to glimpse what their motivations were back then; and, at the same time, this can offer a symptomatic litmus test for what is happening today.
One was a veteran Communist who worked at home and as a result was no longer invited to union meetings, which were now held exclusively at the factory. The only one who knocked on his door and had “an ear to lend” was a militant Nazi who propagandized door-to-door. Another was an independent artisan who had always been involved in progressive Protestant-minded associationism, who was scared to death because his two hired hands were beginning to demand “untenable” wages and were already referring to him as “owner.”
And there’s also the all-political case recorded in Steinach, which ended up being published in Die Tageszeitung and elsewhere: “A worker at a glassworks left the Red union after a conflict with the union president. After he switched to the NSBO – a kind of Nazi union – he immediately became the local leader. Because the former anti-fascist was very popular throughout Thuringia, he managed to persuade a great many workers to switch to Hitler.” Little slices of ordinary life that give us glimpses of the great headache of the Eastern question.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/la-ex-ddr-dal-tramonto-rosso-allalba-nera on 2024-09-01