It was the autumn of 1989. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germans were fighting for their first chance to live in a democracy, after more than half a century of dictatorship, first Nazi then Soviet. There was a touch of magic in this new beginning; the possibility of redemption, confidence, happiness. People wanted to be part of the world again: to be free, to get going again, to do their own thing.
Now, 35 years later, support for the far right in eastern Germany is growing steadily – and its rise seems unstoppable. How did this happen to a society of apparently newly optimistic go-getters?
Something like a new “wall in the mind” is holding east Germans back and creating a politics of resentment that feeds support for the far right. It is a story of deathly silence and enforced denial over two past dictatorships that is still playing out today. There is no single answer, but perhaps a few key points can be made.
I am a former top athlete of the GDR who was doped by the state. After my escape to the west, I helped expose the inhumane doping regime. I know what it is like to live with a web of deceit constructed by state doctrine, because I lived it. And I also lived in a morass of lies at home. My father was a high-ranking Stasi officer working undercover in West Germany with eight identities. And both my grandfathers were in Hitler’s SS.
In our house there was either silence or lies about the second world war and its aftermath, and my family’s involvement. Perhaps my family was extreme, but the silence and lies were in every house. People in the former GDR were used to lies from the government and stony denial at home. This distrust and the lies and enforced silence are now having a huge impact politically.
The most extreme lie was that we East Germans had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Official doctrine was that the West Germans alone were responsible for it, and for concentration camps such as Auschwitz in occupied Poland. This view is still widely held today. As long as these crimes are avoided and denied, the silence about the Nazi era will remain.
In the GDR there was a lot to be silent about. The hundreds of communists who came home from the Soviet gulags in the 1950s were forced to ignore the Stalinist terror they had suffered. The million people displaced from East Prussia, Pomerania, Sudetenland and Silesia whom we had to call “resettlers”, without acknowledging their real origins because we were told they were all Nazis. Their voices were never heard.
Neither were the voices of the hundreds of thousands tortured in GDR prisons, the half a million children who were orphans or were, often, forcibly removed from their parents and placed in state-run children’s homes. Nor the farmers whose farms were expropriated, nor the thousands of athletes such as me who were forced into the state doping programme.
East Germany was a cauldron of suffering that still, after three and a half decades, cannot be openly spoken of. West Germany didn’t want to hear about the pain of the east in the rush to unite. And in the east, former victims and perpetrators of the two dictatorships live cheek by jowl in uncomfortable silence.
But this repressed humiliation – and maybe guilt – is finding expression today in support for the far right. If you look at the map of voting patterns in the east, it’s AfD blue in the lignite mining areas of Lusatia and on the Polish border, areas where a particularly large number of displaced people’s families live.
Young people who never experienced the GDR breathe in the unspoken pain of the older generation, struggle with it and try to put an end to it. In Thuringia, 38% of first-time voters voted for the AfD in recent elections. It has been said they “not only seem disoriented, but also emotionally charged”. The elections in the east show that people are voting out of anger and a desire for vengeance. Because everything is unspoken, they don’t know why they feel this way, but the feeling is fierce.
During the transformation of Germany in the 1990s, the main narrative from the eastern point of view was that the east had been taken over by the west and colonised, while guilt over the Holocaust continued to lie solely with the west. This is a fairytale told by east Germans about east Germans, promoted in highly emotional terms and cemented publicly, to defend themselves against having to take any responsibility for Nazi atrocities and to fill the social vacuum left by the collapse of the GDR.
Another fable is that of the unresolved issue of east German property and resources. This story was publicly constructed to suggest the west had sneakily stolen it all, once more creating victims of easterners. In truth, east Germans managed to aggressively defend their houses, forests and goods, making this a success story. Only 22% of applications for restitution were ultimately approved.
The same gap between myth and reality is true for economic and social trends in east Germany, too. The east has become the engine of the German economy. Liquefied natural gas terminals, renewable energy, new industries – it’s all there, along with renovated cities, significantly better infrastructure than the west, the highest investment and the latest development and research hubs.
Pensions in the east and west have been equalised since mid-2023, while the gender pay gap is much lower in east Germany – 6.3% compared with 20.6% in west Germany – and the number of millionaires in cities such as Dresden and Leipzig is growing.
It’s a real, material success story, but one you don’t hear much about. Perhaps this is because it inevitably raises difficult questions about how a rise in the standard of living can go hand-in-hand with a rise in support for the far right, and whether throwing money at the east was ever going to remedy the legacy of two dictatorships.
Focusing on economic disparities between east and west was important, but when you look more closely, you realise this approach was the west’s attempt to avoid addressing the pain of the east. As a result, it failed to deal with the tyranny suffered there at the hands of the Nazis and the Stasi. It was just too hard to make easterners assume some historical responsibility for the Holocaust, as well as for their own regime, at the same time as trying to reunite the country.
The saga of east German victimhood has served its purpose, to foster the denial of the crimes of two dictatorships. A new narrative is long overdue for the past and the future. Backwards to tell the younger generations the truth about their own history, and forwards to free them from it, so that east Germany can be proud of what has been achieved since 1989.
Without these truths being spoken, the political path to the far right will be unstoppable and the east will continue to be mired in baseless resentment towards Europe, the west and a united Germany.
Ines Geipel is an academic, author and former GDR athlete. Her latest book is Behind the Wall: My Brother, My Family and Hatred in East Germany
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