Germany is dividing again 30 years after fall of wall
• Many in the east feel the government is too quick to help out foreigners or the rich while they are being left behind
Diana Lehman was six when the wall came down. A month or so later, she remembers, her parents drove the family to Bavaria in their East Germanbuilt Trabant to try out this strange new freedom they had been handed.
With $50 each of “welcome money” from the West German government to spend, they took her into a toy store. But it was all too much.
Back home in the east, she would have had a choice of a brown stuffed animal or a grey one. Here the range of choices, the bright colours and flashing lights were bewildering. They left with most of the money still in their pockets.
The shock was only just beginning. To most outsiders, German reunification was a historic success — the communist guards who opened the gates to the west exactly 30 years ago on Saturday were helping end the Cold War and spread democracy through Eastern Europe.
But to those pitched into the reality of overnight capitalism, it was brutal.
Thousands of companies were shuttered, thousands more sold off in a state fire-sale and more than 3-million people lost their jobs.
Lehman, who is now a legislator in the state assembly of Thuringia, says that growing up, she barely knew a single family that was not affected.
“In the west, there’s too little understanding for what the transformation meant for the lives of people in the east,” she says, walking past the socialist tower block in Jena where she grew up in the precarious years after reunification.
As the battle between globalisation and populism rages across the Western world, those scars are putting eastern Germany on the frontline again.
Unemployment has gradually converged with the West — in October, it was 6.1% compared to 4.6%. But wages are still about 20% lower than they are in the west and the post-reunification exodus has left behind a rapidly ageing society that is suspicious of being caught on the wrong side of history all over again.
An earlier generation of easterners watched the Red Army ship their factory machinery back to the Soviet Union after World War 2, while the west was rebuilt with funds from the US Marshall Plan.
SOLIDARITY TAX
The current generation has seen billions of euros handed to banks in Frankfurt, the government in Greece and refugees arriving from Syria, while the €1.5-trillion spent on rebuilding their economy has faded. The government has rolled back the solidarity tax in 2019, drawing a line under its rebuilding efforts.
With Donald Trump insisting it is “America First” while the Brexiteers in London and the nationalists in Budapest tug at either end of the EU, many in the east feel their government is too quick to help out foreigners or the rich while they are being left behind.
In October’s state election in Thuringia, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) won 23%, doubling its share of the vote to leave the legislature gridlocked. Lehman’s Social Democrat Party (SPD) trailed in fourth place with just 8%.
“These trends exist throughout the world,” says Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, a historian from East Berlin and the author of a book on reunification. “But they’re happening faster and more dramatically in East Germany.”
For the past 15 years, easterners have had Angela Merkel, the communist-trained physicist who became chancellor of all Germany, as a symbol that their views are represented at the highest level.
But that chapter is drawing to a close. Merkel is retreating from the tussles of day-to-day politics and her ministers are increasingly flouting her authority at the tail end of her career. Merkel herself has become increasingly bleak in the twilight of her chancellorship. Speaking to those around her, she expresses little confidence in the next generation of German leaders and sees the world sinking further into chaos.
Björn Höcke, the AfD’s victorious leader in Thuringia, embodies Merkel’s fears.
He has said that Germany is “crippled” by its practice of commemorating Nazi crimes and called the Berlin Holocaust memorial near Brandenburg Gate a “monument of shame”. His party was the most popular among voters under 45 that is to say those coming of age in a united Germany.
There is another side to eastern Germany though. In the communist housing projects where Lehman grew up, people stuck together and helped each other out, she says. And that spirit continued even after the regime collapsed.
After her parents lost their jobs at the high-grade lens maker Carl Zeiss, Lehman was often left on her own. Her father tried his luck as a sound engineer touring Europe but wound up pushing trolleys at the local supermarket.
“We were just as hardworking as people in the west, and we also had smart people,” says her mother, Angelika Spirk, who eventually landed a stable job managing operating-room supplies in a hospital. “I’m happy with how things turned out, but I don’t want anyone to cut off my past.”
SOCIAL PROBLEMS
Lehman would bring herself back from school, make her food, do her homework, with neighbours watching out for her. That, she says, shaped her politics. As a student, she volunteered at a food bank, but wanted to do more to tackle the social problems she encountered. She joined the SPD in 2006, became the head of the party’s youth organisation in the state in 2009, and entered
Thuringia’s parliament in 2014. “I want it so people stay here and raise a family,” she says, in her office in the state capital Erfurt, where there is a crib for her two-year-old daughter and a Playmobil fairy hanging from a light fixture. “People here live under extreme uncertainty.”
The state election campaign took its own toll on family life, with Lehman often getting home long after her daughter had been tucked up in bed.
And at the end, voters chose the anger and slogans of the AfD over her vision for bringing Germans together, rooted in the turbulent years that followed communism.
On the night of the results, she and her team were the last to leave the bar in the state capital’s medieval centre, the mood sombre as they absorbed the fact they had lost a third of their seats. But a few days later, back out on the streets, she was ready to get back to work.
“The only good thing is that it’s over,” she says. “It’s a shock, but we have to continue to fight.”
THESE TRENDS EXIST THROUGHOUT THE WORLD. BUT THEY’RE HAPPENING FASTER AND MORE DRAMATICALLY IN EAST GERMANY