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

washingtonpost.com

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

#51

Post by Erwin »

brownbat wrote: post #9
brc wrote: post #5

25 years is a very short time to expect some of the longer term economic and cultural changes to take place. Just like the street light bulbs, they'll get replaced as the old ones die off. On a related note, I've never understood how you could live in West Berlin and yet travel freely to the rest of west Germany, because the city itself was deep in East Germany. I know the city was supplied by airlift during the bloc…

This puzzled me too. Wikipedia has a good overview under the Travel section of the article on West Berlin though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Berlin#Transport_and_trans... Seems like there were a few ways out, and they all had systems of monitoring in place. Westerners on the highways could interact with Easterners, but their trip was monitored at check points, down to how much time they took for the journey, t…

The 1948-49 blockade was also fascinating moment. The Western parts of Berlin (at the time split between France, UK and USA) had their roads blocked off; rather than start getting supplies from the Soviet side and thus lose control over West Berlin, an airlift was instituted which did an amazing 200,000 flights to Tempelhof over 11 months. In comparison, Chicago ORD had 580,000 combined landings and takeoffs in the whole of 2014.

Conflict-wise it's interesting to contrast the general Cold War with the non-wars if Afghanistan, Iraq.

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

#52

Post by facepalm »

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…

And where did all the Solidaritätszuschlag go? I think there has been heavy investment in the East, too. I'm too lazy to look it up, but it must be billions and billions and there is still more coming?

When I came to Leipzig for the first time I was surprised how new and clean everything looked. Much nicer than in rich Munich. Because in Leipzig everything WAS new. However, they also had some building scandal (one guy defrauding banks to do lots of expensive building), I am not sure if that also factored into it.

I heard back then (a couple of years after reunion) that for example universities also had better equipment in the East because everything was new.

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

#53

Post by ethbro »

Rondom wrote: post #17
specialk wrote: post #16

I'm a little concerned with the lack of any absolute numbers in the data visualisations in this article. The 'more/less' and 'higher/lower' bars could be very misleading on some of these stats. I can understand that adding numbers can make these visualisations a little more intimidating but is it too much to expect the high/low ranges to have an absolute number on them? For example in the disposal income visualisatio…

The original article published in the German newspaper Die Zeit has the graphics with numbers. The article and the graphics are in English. http://zeit.de/feature/german-unification-a-nation-divided I do not know why the Washington Post removed the numbers in their graphics...

Washington Post is courting the "numbers are a distraction from the story" demographic.

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

#54

Post by lispm »

emsy wrote: post #45
lispm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 astonishi…

By "thinking what they're told" I mean that they believe everything they hear and see little to no reason for political activity. In caricatures, Germans were and sometimes still are depicted as a "Deutscher Michel" with a nightcap, because of their political inactivity and lethargy. So what I actually meant was that in German media, the cultural differences between east and west are still heavily emphasized, there a…

> The differences do exist, but you could take any 2 Bundesländer and they'd have almost or even more differences to each other, than any western Bundesland has with an eastern one.

There are differences between Bundesländer. But West vs. East has a lot of special differences: ownership, farms, small and medium companies, political views, religion, etc...

For example North and South parts of West Germany differ in religion: protestant vs. catholic. East Germany OTOH has a larger atheist population.

From a long term cultural view, somebody from Rostock is not much different than somebody from Hamburg (where I live). It's just that Hamburg had several decades economic success, and Rostock did not. This affects employment, job opportunities, population development, GDP, etc. The differences between the former East and West Germany are real, even though some are getting smaller. It will take more decades to change things. The equal living standard is a goal. Generally differences are okay and Germany had always states which had their own business/views/traditions - different from countries where there is a more centralized situation (UK/London, France/Paris, ...).

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

#55

Post by pinaceae »

bildung wrote: post #40
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 appear…

bullshit.

as it takes a magnitude more energy to refute bullshit than to produce it, i'll be brief.

1., the complete soviet block collapsed due to its economic system and policies. growth, consistently from 50 to 80s, higher than in the west? are you delusional?

2., the "saurer regen" was a) never that bad and b) still tackled and fixed. what exactly did the east ever fix?

as someone who travelled into the old eastern block due to my heritage i have to say that your revisionist bullshit is deeply offending.

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

#56

Post by pinaceae »

vegedor wrote: post #41
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…

A lot of people who vote for Die Linke might either be too young to really have experienced the GDR in full bloom, or are compelled by actual arguments, of which they occasionally feign a few good ones, as politicians usually do. BTW: I met a lot of people who'd been incarcerated mostly for their political motivation, but I've never met anyone who was murdered. Although I see how that might be difficult, I haven't ev…

count all the deaths by border guards plus the victims of 1953.

plus hard to meet someone who has been murdered...

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

#57

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

I like to think the German people as a culture changed twice or thrice over the past 100 years; WW1, then the economic problems which helped bring the nazi party to power and change the Germans' culture, then WW2 (as a continuation therof) and the post-war fallout and separation of the country for two generations. Then the post-cold war rebuild, the period we're in right now. I doubt much of 'classic' German-ness remained out of all of those events and cultural changes.

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

#58

Post by gambiting »

>>Here is one possible explanation: Having dealt with constant food shortages until 1989, eastern Germans learned to economize and buy only those items they deemed necessary

There are two sides to this. After the fall of communism in Poland in 1989 people would buy EVERYTHING they could put their hands on. We had 3 washing machines in our basement - when I asked my father why, he replied that during communist times you had to apply to the government for a permit to buy one, so after 1989, when you suddenly could just walk into a store and buy one with no restrictions, it made perfect sense to buy 3 at once! You never know if you won't need more! And the same principle applied to everything. In fact, my father made a very successful business importing stuff from the West, since (as he put it) you could bring back a truck full of any junk you could find, and people would buy it - they were so eager to breathe in this new capitalist freedom where anyone could buy anything, that they were buying old TVs and motorcycles by a dozen.

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

#60

Post by jboynyc »

emsy wrote: post #44
jboynyc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 betwee…

A nation is not defined by borders and politics.

Yes, it is. Nationalism as a political ideology just likes to pretend as though it weren't.
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