The Berlin Wall “will be standing in 50 and even in 100 years”, Erich Honecker, the leader of socialist East Germany, prophesied in January 1989. Not for the first time, he was spectacularly wrong. The wall fell just 10 months later, in November 1989. But not all barriers to German unity fell with it. Honecker’s German Democratic Republic (GDR) may have been wiped off the map by subsequent events, but like an afterimage that won’t fade, its contours remain etched on Germany’s cultural, economic and political landscape.
In 2024, the east of the country remains in sharp focus as the heartland of anti-establishment movements. Three of the five states that once formed the GDR will hold regional elections in September, the outcomes of which are anxiously anticipated ahead of the general election set for next year. The far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is leading the polls in all three, while also being the second-strongest party nationwide. In the frantic search for answers that might help explain and combat the rise of extremism, many ask: what is wrong in the east?
It’s not a new question. East Germans, nicknamed Ossis, have long been viewed with suspicion by a media landscape that is overwhelmingly dominated by west Germans, or Wessis. Even the majority of regional papers in the east are run by western editorial staff, and this has consequences for the way people are seen and portrayed. Mathias Döpfner, the boss of one of Europe’s largest media groups, Axel Springer, had to apologise last year after some correspondence was leaked in which he claimed: “Ossis are either communists or fascists … disgusting.”
He is not the only one to feel that there is little point engaging with east Germans. During the last general election year of 2021, the government official responsible for east Germany under the then chancellor Angela Merkel (who grew up in the GDR herself) claimed that some of his fellow Ossis had been “socialised in a dictatorship in a manner so that they still haven’t arrived in democracy after 30 years”. He deemed only a small proportion “potentially retrievable”. Armin Laschet, the man who had hoped to replace Merkel as chancellor, only reluctantly travelled to the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt during his campaign, speaking mostly to invited audiences. Political wisdom was that disgruntled Ossis weren’t worth the effort, given that they only make up 16.7% of the population.
As east Germans are such a small and underrepresented minority, their behaviours and characteristics have lazily been written off as a deviation from the west German norm, fostering a defiant us-against-them mentality. According to a survey last year, 40% of people in the east explicitly identify as “east Germans”. Granted, that’s fewer than the 52% who feel “German”, but by contrast, only 18% of west Germans identify along the lines of their former cold war-era state.
This east German identity, combined with the feeling of being othered and marginalised, is a powerful thing for the AfD to exploit. The far-right party invests a lot in its presence at the grassroots level. At pub evenings, lectures and other local events, it engages with real people rather than hand-selected audiences. Messages such as “The East Rises Up!” appear on AfD placards, speaking to people who feel they have been neglected by the mainstream.
The way for other parties to regain the trust of east German voters therefore requires empathy, not condemnation, and that begins with acknowledging their unique experiences in the present and in the past. The complex lives east Germans had in the GDR are still often written off as “dictatorship socialisation”, as if everything they did and thought before reunification was at best irrelevant to present-day realities, at worst toxic to them. Pre-1990 biographies were seen as embarrassing, dangerous and wrong, so were self-censored by many east Germans. Even Angela Merkel, who occupied the highest political office of the land for 16 years, didn’t feel she could speak about her past freely. In a rare interview last year, she admitted she held back all this time because she feared people would say: “Now she is going on about her East Germany again.”
There are economic imbalances too, which many easterners don’t want to address for fear of being labelled with the widespread derogatory term “Jammerossi”, or “yammering Ossi”. Yet, the hard economic facts are undeniable. According to 2021 figures, east Germans still have 11% less disposable income than their western compatriots, and they inherit only about half as much wealth. Impose almost any economic indicator on to a map, and the old east-west divide reappears.
But there are signs that something is shifting in the public dialogue about the east. Last year, a new “east-west debate”, as the German media have dubbed it, began to gather pace when a number of books appeared in the bestseller lists that were written by people born in the GDR. The most successful one was The East: A West German Invention, an angry treatise on how east Germans have fared since 1990, written by the literature professor Dirk Oschmann. It argues that a combination of discrimination, underrepresentation and pre-existing power and wealth imbalances has kept the rift between east and west wide open.
Oschmann’s book sold well over 150,000 copies. He thinks the reception has been so phenomenal because “it sharply brought a blind spot of the debate about east Germany’s problems into focus, namely the great share of responsibility west Germany has for them”.
There are other clear signs that the east is shifting into the national focus, even beyond the very narrow political debate around the AfD. My history of the GDR, Beyond the Wall, also fell into this new east-west debate when it appeared in translation in Germany last year. It was often discussed in connection with Oschmann’s book, and also spent months on the bestseller lists. Other new publications, including novels by and about Ossis, hit the shelves too. The books may be different in style, content, format and core audience, but what they have in common and what allowed them to touch a raw nerve is that they are all doing what Merkel felt she couldn’t just a few years ago: “going on about East Germany again”.
A heated national discussion has been unleashed about east Germany’s past, present and future. I share Oschmann’s hope that it falls within a wider phase of renegotiation of Germany’s national self-perception. Thirty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the specific concerns, experiences and identities of east Germans still matter, and they should be taken seriously in an effort to ensure that the invisible wall in Germany won’t still be standing in 50 or even in 100 years.
Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and journalist. Her most recent book is Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990
