Here is an interesting analysis of the German election results.
I don't follow German politics very closely, but I was intrigued to see on the election map that the AfD - the so-called "far right" party - won overwhelmingly in East Germany.
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Unfortunately, East Germans can be ignorant and thuggish (skinheads etc), so the AfD's popularity there just reinforces negative stereotypes about 'Ossies' and the AfD itself. Even as AfD is led by a highly accomplished lesbian with a Sri Lankan partner!
ReplyDeleteThe way German politics is divided into 5 fairly equal parties instead of two main ones seems to have been built into the system too. So they get geographical duality instead: urbane 'sophisticated' W Germany must lead the backward East.
So I'm not hopeful. And I have family who live there.
I'm thinking that the East Germans see the echo of the old Soviet Union in the censorship and planned green economy and the poverty that they escaped from and see the AfD as the opposite of what they escaped.
ReplyDeleteBut it may surprise you that 'nostalgia for communism' is a thing in the former East Germany. Maybe less now among the young, but that's the irony of it: the older folks who actually suffered under Soviet domination...eventually missed it.
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostalgie
Germans are weird, is all I can say.
I spent the past 25 years living part-time in the former East Germany. It is generally more conservative than the West. Many East Germans have a sense that the West simply abandoned them when the wall went up. Thuringia, where I live, was actually liberated by the Americans but traded to the Soviets in return for a piece of Berlin. Talk about betrayal! East Germans also tend to hold onto their traditional culture more strongly than the West. When I was stationed there in the Army back in 69-70 (in the West of course) the German traditions were still strong, evident in their music, festivals, cleanliness, order, etc. But the West started thinking that all smacked of jingoism and gradually purged it in favor of progressivism. The East held onto their traditions, somewhat, partly as a defense against the Soviets.
DeleteI always remember marching in the Armed Forces Day parade in Berlin in 1970. We started in the University district where the students had huge banners of Mao Tse Tung hanging out the dormitory windows and pelted us with rocks and bottles. How clueless could anybody be? It was a seminal event in my transition from liberal to conservative.
What's the German version of 'so near, and yet so far'?
ReplyDelete