Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, but Germany is still divided

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 73 posts

Re: The Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, but Germany is still divided

#31

Post by aikah »

ams6110 wrote: post #10
brownbat wrote: post #6

This led me down a few rabbit holes online. I had never heard the Kennedy or Reagan speeches from Berlin, but they're embedded on the wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall Those both stood out against the backdrop of dry political speeches. You have a leading statesman, sure, of a country with plenty of its own flaws, but calling out a system that is completely absurd, immoral, and against the course of hist…

Probably in Syria, calling for reform of radical Islam.

> Probably in Syria, calling for reform of radical Islam.

What you say makes no sense.Of all the countries in middle-east,Syria is one of the least islamic and did a good job at protecting minorities like christians.

Your saudi folks on the other hand are no different that what ISIS is preaching.But your government loves saudi money.

Re: The Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, but Germany is still divided

#32

Post by adventured »

brownbat wrote: post #6

This led me down a few rabbit holes online. I had never heard the Kennedy or Reagan speeches from Berlin, but they're embedded on the wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall Those both stood out against the backdrop of dry political speeches. You have a leading statesman, sure, of a country with plenty of its own flaws, but calling out a system that is completely absurd, immoral, and against the course of hist…

In Washington DC, calling for the dismantling of the military industrial complex, an end to perpetual war, a pacifying of the increasingly violent police, and the general re-establishment of the individual rights enshrined in the Constitution.

Re: The Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, but Germany is still divided

#33

Post by adventured »

aikah wrote: post #31
ams6110 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably in Syria, calling for reform of radical Islam.

> Probably in Syria, calling for reform of radical Islam. What you say makes no sense.Of all the countries in middle-east,Syria is one of the least islamic and did a good job at protecting minorities like christians. Your saudi folks on the other hand are no different that what ISIS is preaching.But your government loves saudi money.

The US loved Saudi oil, not Saudi money so much. The US never really needed money from Saudi Arabia. The sole reason the US took a distinct interest in propping up the monarchy was for oil price and supply stability.

With the US boom in shale / fracking oil (and Canada's coinciding oil boom), Saudi oil not only matters less by the day to the US, but Saudi Arabia is increasingly becoming a hostile oil competitor looking to fight the US domestics for market share. That conflict will get worse by the year going forward, likely eventually ending with the US reducing its guarantees of security for the monarchy and with the Saudis turning increasingly to China for protection.

Re: The Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, but Germany is still divided

#34

Post by ul5255 »

KobaQ wrote: post #29
miked wrote: post #27

Reading this, I couldn't help thinking of an observation P.J. O'Rourke made after visiting the DDR ("East Germany"): "It takes a special kind of economic system to turn a nation full of Germans into a third-world country".

Nails it. Great quote. And you can't reverse the damage of this economic system overnight, especially when almost all of the young people willing to build and create something new have moved away.

The last part of your reply is especially important: East Germany is most likely the blue print of what will happen to the southern portions of the European Union. I am surprized this is not discussed more widely. Deindustrialization with most of the educated young generation moving away. This trend is hard to reverse.

Re: The Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, but Germany is still divided

#35

Post by emsy »

I'm from Germany (born shortly before the fall) , and I always found it super weird that this "us vs. them" mentality existed. Compared to the enormous timespan east and west Germany was considered the same nation, those 40 years seem to pale in comparison. Besides that, there wasn't a civil war or anything that divided the population intrinsically, but it was forced upon us. On the other hand, Germans are known for doing or thinking what they're told and in German media and the German mindset, the wall still exists.

Re: The Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, but Germany is still divided

#36

Post by jboynyc »

emsy wrote: post #35

I'm from Germany (born shortly before the fall) , and I always found it super weird that this "us vs. them" mentality existed. Compared to the enormous timespan east and west Germany was considered the same nation, those 40 years seem to pale in comparison. Besides that, there wasn't a civil war or anything that divided the population intrinsically, but it was forced upon us. On the other hand, Germans are known for…

"Enormous timespan"? I think if you take some history into account you will reconsider that. We tend to project the existence of a construct called Germany backward in time, but Germany did not really come into existence until a bunch of small states were united under Prussian leadership in 1871, and even then it remained a pretty fragile construct. Lots of tribalisms remained. Still, if you count the timespan between 1871 and 1945, you get a bit over 70 years. That's not nothing, but not that much more than 40 years. You should probably subtract the four years of WWI and the 12 catastrophic years of Nazi rule, and then you are left with less than 60 years of shared history before the division into east and west.

Re: The Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, but Germany is still divided

#37

Post by vegedor »

growupkids wrote: post #26
mxfh wrote: post #22

Had a small twitter discussion with the editor of the article yesterday, that for example the data on trash is not comparable (different metrics in different municipalities, for example counting collected foliage or not), especially that it doesn't allow the conclusion for a national divide, based on some vague stereotypes. At least this fact got amended into the paragraph. The bigger picture is that the eastern part…

Don't forget the crushing secret police state, the high cost of the soviet focus on war production that redeployed commerce across the soviet empire to make weapons, instead of consumer goods, centralized planning, failed communist economic policies, gulags, and the decades of communist education that wiped out generations of entrepreneurs.

Wait a second, who was send to Gulags (in Siberia, I suppose)?

Re: The Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, but Germany is still divided

#38

Post by vegedor »

KobaQ wrote: post #29
miked wrote: post #27

Reading this, I couldn't help thinking of an observation P.J. O'Rourke made after visiting the DDR ("East Germany"): "It takes a special kind of economic system to turn a nation full of Germans into a third-world country".

Nails it. Great quote. And you can't reverse the damage of this economic system overnight, especially when almost all of the young people willing to build and create something new have moved away.

as if the Morgenthau Plan was never canceled

Re: The Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, but Germany is still divided

#39

Post by lispm »

emsy wrote: post #35

I'm from Germany (born shortly before the fall) , and I always found it super weird that this "us vs. them" mentality existed. Compared to the enormous timespan east and west Germany was considered the same nation, those 40 years seem to pale in comparison. Besides that, there wasn't a civil war or anything that divided the population intrinsically, but it was forced upon us. On the other hand, Germans are known for…

WWII was wiping out a lot of German history. In the west some restauration of old elites took place. In the east, a new political and economic system replaced what was there before. 40 years means roughly two generations of socialism under soviet leadership. Both parts of Germany were developing into role models for their political systems. A lot of structural change took place in the east.

It's also always astonishing how very little basic views change over time in people. I can well remember that many of the generation who grew up before or during WWII was anti-semitic views long after the Third Reich. Even people who were not active racists had them. The Third Reich was responsible for some, but some views were very old (see for example Martin Luther http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_and_antisemitism ).

For some change the previous generations have to die away, but there are underlying views which are hard to change even between generations.

> Germans are known for doing or thinking what they're told

Well, actually communism was a German invention. You may have heard of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and others. The particular combination of Racism and National Socialism / Fascism was also a home-grown development. A working model of democracy had to be explained to us, though. It took a few decades in West Germany to make it work, put the results were positive.

Re: The Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago, but Germany is still divided

#40

Post by bildung »

KobaQ wrote: post #28

I'm always annoyed that while pointing out that the right-wing extremist parties are stronger in the east than in the west of Germany, they really don't matter at all. Look at their numbers[1]. However, the left-wing extremist party "Die Linke" is a direct successor of the SED, which was the communist party of the DDR, is surprisingly strong [2]. Clearly, it shows the disappointment of the reunion of quite some peopl…

The difficulties these regions face are a direct consequence of the exploitation done by the communist dictation (the SED).

While that is an often repeated trope, you'll be hard pressed to find actual studies supporting it. In fact is seems that correcting for the different start positions of both economies (marshall plan in the west vs. reparations in the east) explains pretty much all the difference that was appearent in the late 80s. (see e.g. "Das Scheitern des Realsozialismus" by Steinitz).

I'm not sure why that trope is so successful, but one reason could be the that from the viewpoint of someone from the western parts of Germany looking at the eastern parts, what catches the eye is the abysimal effiency of the micro economical structures, as micro economical effiency is something a market economy shines at. The macro economical aspects are not that appearent for an observer because apart from monetary policy macro economies aren't part of the western political discourse. But Eastern Germany had a planned economy, e.g. the focus laid on the macro economical development, and macro economical growth was indeed consistently higher than in Western Germany from the 50s until the 80s.

It took billions of euros to alone fix the environmental damage, e.g. in Bitterfeld

...as it did in Western Germany in the 80s. Haven't you seen the pictures of the massive acid rain damages of the black forest in Western Germany? (have a look at "der Spiegel" from 1981: http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-14347006.html) Those massive environmental destructions were results of the industrial zeitgeist and could be observed in both political hemispheres.

Post reply on HN