By 1988, the average East German drank 142 litres of beer a year, double the intake of the average West German. The obvious explanation is they drank to escape the unbearable awfulness of being in the German Democratic Republic, with its omnipresent Stasi, clown-car Trabants, travel restrictions, gerontocratic rulers, grim Baltic holidays and laughable elections.
Not so, argues East German-born historian Katja Hoyer. Most East Germans drank not to forget their worries but because they had so little to worry about. She writes: “for those who wanted a quiet life with the small comforts of home it was a stable place with few concerns or worries”. By the late 1980s, true, the level of surveillance carried out by the Stasi was at an all-time high, but often it did little with the information gathered. In this, it was arguably less intrusive, certainly less effective, than today’s data-plundering techno-giants.
