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

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

#61

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#62

Post by venomsnake »

vegedor wrote: post #37
growupkids wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Little mentioned fact is that after WWII the soviets took almost 1M people laborers from Germany to USSR. I think some of them returned.

The allies also used a lot of them. Not their brightest hour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labor_of_Germans_after_W...

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

#63

Post by venomsnake »

jedrek wrote: post #59

It's amazing how little it takes to create divisions and how long it takes to reunite. I assume that the Koreas are looking at Germany's reunification long and hard, and I imagine they are scared shitless.

If there is North Korea left. They seem hell bent on destroying their country.

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

#64

Post by venomsnake »

rapidally wrote: post #24

Why is this on Hacker News? Is this site going to use its popularity to preach about social issues now, like so many other tech sites have? That's a huge turn off for me.

Because there are hackers for which the fall of the wall was the defining moment of their life, hackers that were not even born back then and need to learn some history and hackers that are just curious ...

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

#65

Post by morsch »

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…

Die Linke is the successor to the SED, a party that went defunct 25 years ago. It's been participating in the democratic process ever since reunification, and is part of several state as well as numerous local governments. For the most part, and certainly in terms of their actual political activity, the correct label is "social democratic" and not so much "extremist". It's anything but surprising they poll in the double digits, right-wing political spin notwithstanding.

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

#66

Post by zwieback »

25 years isn't that long, really. My dad grew up in Berlin during and right after the war, my mom's family fed to the West after losing their factory and property in the East to the Russians and were denied education due to their bourgeois status. Their world view is still shaped by those events so how could 25 years wipe out the stark divisions between the two Germanies.

It's hard to describe what it was like traveling as a tourist to East Berlin. Stepping out of the S Bahn station into the East was like emerging into a movie set of the immediate post war era, it even seemed like being in a black and white movie. Trying to spend the 25 Marks they forced you to exchange into Ostmarks was nearly impossible, there was just nothing you wanted to buy there except for Russion literature, maybe.

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

#67

Post by mikeash »

fosk wrote: post #13
NegativeK wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The airlift had to happen because the USSR cut off the highway access to West Berlin. I believe the highway was cordoned off from the rest of East Germany.

One thing that I never understood is that in order to make this happen, planes had to fly above the USSR controlled East Germany, what prevented the soviets from just shooting down every plane since it was their airspace at the time?

The same forces that prevented active warfare between the superpowers throughout the Cold War period. It came down to how much provocation they could get away with. In the case of the blockade, preventing ground traffic was doable but shooting down airplanes would have rapidly led to an all-out war.

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

#68

Post by mikeash »

jedrek wrote: post #59

It's amazing how little it takes to create divisions and how long it takes to reunite. I assume that the Koreas are looking at Germany's reunification long and hard, and I imagine they are scared shitless.

Korean reunification is almost incomprehensible. Germany had and has massive problems, despite the fact that East Germany did exceptionally well relative to the Communist world. North Korea, by contrast, is a total shithole even by Communist standards. Best case, it seems to me like North Korea would need to go through decades of reform and catching up before reunification could even be considered. And that of course assumes that the North Korean leadership comes down with a sudden case of acute sanity, which doesn't look likely to happen anytime soon.

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

#69

Post by mikeash »

Theodores wrote: post #7

"Offa's Dyke fell 750 years ago, but, the United Kingdom is still divided" I am not sure about flu jabs and childcare or even who does their recycling, however I am sure that most of the comparisons can be said about England and Wales. It would be funny if pollsters did surveys and found 50% of English people didn't think the union with Wales had worked out as well as the king had told them it would.

Look north instead of west and you'll see a chunk of the United Kingdom where a lot of people seem to think that joining with the English was a bad idea after all.

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

#70

Post by ihnorton »

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…

President Obama made a major, iconically-staged speech in Cairo in 2009 regarding relations between Muslim-majority countries and the NATO (approximately) West:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Beginning

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