Picture: Fall of the Berlin Wall
Many East Germans remember East Germany favorably:
Today, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, 57 percent, or an absolute majority, of eastern Germans defend the former East Germany. “The GDR had more good sides than bad sides. There were some problems, but life was good there,” say 49 percent of those polled.
The state with the Berlin Wall, which people died to get across, is remembered fondly?
Some of this, as the article points out, is nostalgia. Some of it is from people who were children or not even alive when East Germany fell.
But I’m not surprised, because the happiness and life satisfaction data for East Germany showed a precipitous fall after unification, as it did in Russia after Communism fell there. (That drop has been made up since, but it was huge.)
I’m further not surprised because there were things that East Germany, in particular, did well. To start, it did community and civic association brilliantly: There were clubs for everything, people joined them, and they enjoyed them.
Happiness is strongly correlated to community: The sort of anomie which capitalist societies encourage, where you know hardly anyone well, destroys happiness.
Second, there wasn’t a great deal of inequality compared to modern capitalism. The research on happiness and equality is robust–the more equal a society, the happier people are.
Third, everyone was more or less taken care of. They may not have been taken care of with the finest consumer goods, but they had enough food, shelter, and so on.
Fourth, they didn’t have to move much. Labor force mobility in Germany today isn’t terrible, but the sure knowledge that you can stay where you were born and grew up can be as much a comfort as anything else, and it means that you don’t leave behind your community–your friends and family.
Capitalist transitions are brutal. The data from China is unambiguous: People moving from their ancestral villages to the city generally are never, personally, as happy as they were in the village.
The people interviewed in Der Spiegel’s article on East Germany tend to acknowledge the East German Stasi police state as bad, then wave it aside.
How badly has your life been affected by the fact that your government spies on you 24/7? East Germany may have had huge numbers of informants, but London has cameras everywhere and “anti-social disorder orders,” which make virtually any behaviour cops want to call illegal, illegal. Nor was East Germany’s incarceration rate nearly as high as America’s is now, and so on.
Sure, “the police state” was bad, but that wasn’t, to people who lived there, necessarily the most important thing about being an East German. Westerners believe this because of relentless cold war propaganda. Then the USSR and the Warsaw Pact fell, and our lords and masters started building their own surveillance and police states.
Still, it’s a bad sign when you aren’t even considered a better place to live than East Germany, with its Stasi. The failures of the post-Soviet era are making that period look better and better. In Russia, there is a surge of nostalgia for the USSR, for reasons which are are remarkably similar. People are discovering that, as wonderful as Levis jeans are, there is a cost to the modern consumer society in terms of anomie, corruption, and economic precarity.
Though I think I like the bitter joke from 1990s Russia best:
Everything they (Communist authorities) told us about Communism was a lie. Unfortunately, everything they told us about Capitalism was the truth.
And so the wheel turns. When capitalism, in a large region in one of the most successful countries in the West, has half the population thinking communism wasn’t so bad, something has gone off the rails. Triumphalism of the “we’ve won, so we don’t have to treat the population well” variety may well yet bite capitalists, and all of us, hard.
If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
DanB
Ian,
I’m now finishing a book focused on the intelligentsia of East Germany’s collective identity during the end of the GDR and the unification of Germany unfolded. The initial interviews were done in 1990-91. I did follow up interviews in the summer of 2014 with 1/4 of the original 100 I interviewed. In sum, they viewed the unification as a takeover or colonization by the West Germans, because that’s how capitalism works. Also, not one of the 24 I reinterviewed in 2014 said capitalism was a better system. They remain in their hearts “former citizens of East Germany” now residing in the “Bundesrepublik Deutschland” who have adapted to the capitalist system out of economic necessity.
DMC
Here in the Czech Republic about 11 to 15% of the populace still votes for the rump of the old Czech Communist Party. Typically they’re pensioners. More widely, the man in the street doesn’t tend to have much good to say about “the Totality”, which is how they term the Communist period. They tend to lump Socialism in with Russian domination, which is widely loathed, the attitude of President Zeman(a BIG Putin fan, widely seen as a falling down drunk) notwithstanding. The Czechs seem to have done a rather better job transitioning to Capitalism than most of the old Warsaw Pact countries and whether its due to the their innate caution, preservation of their industrial base or geographic location is anybody’s guess. They didn’t jump right into the Euro for instance and that’s starting to look very smart indeed. Their banking sector avoided most of the 2007 meltdown by not loading up with toxic assets. Sales personel in business are actually motivated to get the customer what he needs, not to just sell anybody as many units as possible. American companies come here and try American methods and their Czech colleagues just sort of cluck their tounges and go “Oh, that won’t work here. You’re dealing with Czechs now and they’ll just resent this hi pressure approach and take their business elsewhere”.
EmilianoZ
What’s also interesting is how the Spiegel journalist interprets the nostalgia. According to her it’s mainly a defensive cultural reflex. There seems to be some similarities between the West/East divide in Germany and the North/South divide in the US. The West (North) sees the East (South) as retarded, so the eastern (southern) people defend their homeland vigorously. It doesn’t seem like a serious option to the journalist that some people might genuinely not like neoliberalism.
Mandos
A good friend of mine in Canada had been a Polish refugee who loathes all things Communist or even mildly leftist. When I tell him this, that there are many people who feel that their lives were happier before the wall fell, his response is, with a sneer, “Yes, you know, things were easy.” He’s serious about that: he acknowledges that many people had to struggle more after the end of Commonism — and he views their desire and nostalgia for an “easy” life under Communism with contempt. He would rather they embrace capitalist struggle rather than have a little more happiness.
Ian Welsh
The main problem with East Germany etc… were the exit bans. Other than that, if they wanted an “easy” life, that’s certainly no one else’s business.
But it was, as I note in the article, more than it being “easy”.
Mandos
Other than that, if they wanted an “easy” life, that’s certainly no one else’s business.
Ah, but that’s one of the fundamental ideological conflict points: whether it is someone else’s business. Ensuring that the majority of people have an “easy” (meaning, I assume, moderately comfortable, somewhat modern) life without a constant competitive struggle requires a certain amount of…cooperative effort. Allowing people with skills in demand elsewhere to leave, means that they can forego cooperation. That to me is the purpose of an exit ban in a Communist state. To people like my formerly Polish friend, the price of an “easy” life is that very draconian restraint on people of a competitive and self-actualizing (selfish?) bent of mind.
I’ve had similar sentiments expressed to me by people from former Warsaw Pact countries. I have a Bulgarian friend who was too young to leave at the time, but he tells me of his contempt for his countrymen who miss Communism because life was easier for them. That easiness came at a price for which many would trade the pathologies of capitalism.
Ian Welsh
That’s the fundamental problem in Capitalism too, Mandos. I massively object to subsidizing bankers, oil men and suburban home owners, but I don’t get a choice. Every system which has ever existed subsidized someone, and generally large classes of someone. The inefficiencies in capitalism are now arguably equal to late communism.
(Perhaps because capitalism isn’t, and neither is communism, but that’s a discussion for another time.)
The genius of our current form of capitalism is how it makes massive subsidies look like they aren’t. In that respect the old communist systems were at least more honest.
Tony Wikrent
Ian writes: “The inefficiencies in capitalism are now arguably equal to late communism.”
From what I understand, there used to be a widespread joke in the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc. The past couple years, I’ve come to believe that the joke now applies just as well to the USA, UK, and other western countries where income inequalities are now higher than the 1920s.
We especially see it in retail clerks, many of whom can’t make change without the assistance of an electronic register, and most of whom clearly don’t care about much of anything about their place of employment.
‘They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”
Don Gisselbeck
When a member of the predator class calls one of us untermenschen “lazy” they mean “unwilling to work 90 hours a week for bad room and board, and an ever growing debt to the company store”.
JustPlainDave
A couple of points:
1) Capitalism per se doesn’t destroy pro-social behaviours. It was extremely successful for long periods at fostering such behaviours. Near as a lot of us can tell, the really key new driver is Internet-mediated communication. There are others pushing in the same direction, and some are quite powerful, but this is the really new one. You are, by the way, “soaking in it”.
2) When one’s security state is maintaining files (literally paper files) on 25% of the population and formally employs 1-2% of the population working internal security (driving a much larger unpaid informant net) and collects primarily HUMINT, yeah, that’s actually significantly worse than pervasive electronic monitoring. (The vast, vast majority of which is of the “if someone blows up, we’ll hopefully be able to figure out who it was” mainly security theatre variety.)
3) Incarceration rates have basically nothing to do with how pervasive surveillance is. That is squarely at the feet of stringent sentencing guidelines.
rkka
“That easiness came at a price for which many would trade the pathologies of capitalism.”
Some indeed do consider the trade worth it.
For instance, you will never find more enthusiastic FreeMarketReformers than the governments of the Baltic States. Back when they had been suffering the horrors of Communism for 46 years, they had a combined growing population of about 8 million. After 25 years of the delights of FreeMarketReform, there are 6.3 million of them, and now yearly deaths exceed births by 1.35 to 1.
There are now half as many children 14 and under in Latvia than there were in 1989. Life is so much harder now, that perpetuating life does not seem to be on the agenda there any more. And Poland’s birth rate is now just as low as that of the Baltics.
I hope the Polish friend is satisfied with how hard life now is.
And Russia was just like that. Until Putin.
No wonder the Anglosphere Foreign Policy Elite & Punditocracy (AFPE&P) hate him so!
mike
Less than half the states, where the bulk of the incarceration is, have sentencing guidelines, and, of those, only about half are mandatory in any way. The drivers of our overincarceration are counties that get to charge up their versions of “justice” on the state credit card with little restriction in most states and their representative DAs who have accumulated the power through “tough on crime” political pressure on legislators and through use of mandatory minimums (guidelines or no) and overcharging/multiple charging to force sentencing and other plea “bargains” higher and higher. Law professors like David Ball and John Pfaff have documented the county/DA side and like Stephanos Bibos and William Stuntz have spelled out the degeneration of our criminal processing system as “professional” practitioners have taken more and more control away from citizens who, despite fears of runaway juries, produced much lower incarceration rates when they had more say.
Inverness
It’s essential to raise the question of dissidents. Life could be utter hell for East German dissidents. I wouldn’t want to be Edward Snowden, either. However, it seems that there is still (for now?) more room for people to criticize the party line in the West, in general, than there was in East Germany. I cannot imagine an East German Noam Chomsky roaming free, for example.
Maybe the future is both feudalism and less and less civil liberties. We are certainly moving in that direction. If this is the case, then why the lack of imagination?
g3
Vague recall/paraphrase from a Michael Parenti book : “What did capitalism achieve in 10 years which communism couldn’t do in 70 years? Making Communism look so good”. Who said capitalism is not efficient?
g3
Karl Marx credit cards popular in Eastern Germany for the same reason :
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/15/us-germany-marx-idUSBRE85E0VQ20120615
JustPlainDave
mike, I’m not so sure about that. To be clear, not because the drivers you name aren’t potent and not because there haven’t been declines in mandatory sentencing and prison populations in some pretty big states. Rather, I’m simply not sure that the drops have yet been big enough to wipe out the huge pre-existing populations. Those are some big, big numbers to reverse and I have always been told that most of that was due to sentencing. That said, if you have better insight on it, I’d welcome it.
C. J Mills
I visited East Germany twice, once in 1989 and then again in 1990. I had friends there. Big parts of the nostalgia may be that in the DDR, everyone had a job (and its self-worth), even if it was only sweeping a street, and DDR natives saw the “Westies” as treating them as if they lived in a third-world country and as if they didn’t deserve to be involved in decisions involving their cities and towns. An example was the rebuilding of the Cathedral in Dresden: the residents didn’t want that done, they wanted their memorial to the war like the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtnis Kirche in West Berlin, and the Westies rebuilt the cathedral anyway.
Mandos
Yep. But it’s not just dissidents. The Warsaw Pact countries were apparently terrified of exit. The Berlin Wall wasn’t the only place people were shot. Lots of people were shot trying to get to e.g. Greece from Bulgaria. And, of course, one of the motivations for building the Berlin wall was to prevent defection. For a time, the only people who were allowed to cross into West Berlin were people who were considered likely to return. Except for some dissidents, who were actively exiled. Dissidents and defectors were different phenomena and represented different threats to communist regimes.
I’m bringing it up because it’s really not a thing that economically-lefty movements really talk about in their approach to governance — the possibility of and motivations for defection. Even with constant effort and education (or propaganda depending on your perspective), communist countries ended up producing lots of people who were not “on board” with the programme of everyone sort of having a job and not too many people getting a bigger slice of the pie. People who are not willing, effectively, to cooperate with the idea that everyone else should have an “easy” life.
I am not one who says that communism accomplished nothing. I’ve been to East Berlin, despite everything the communists built things that last. And certainly, you can say that the capitalist world is heading in that direction too; but I suspect that they won’t be so stupid as to end the appearance, at least, of the possibility of exit.
Mandos
It’s not genius at all. It’s very easy. People only have to feel like their lives are dependent on the flow of oil for them to be on board with oil industry subsidies, etc.
Mandos
I have been living in Europe for the past few years, and I have met my share of people from austerity-victim countries, including the Baltics. I don’t get the sense of urgency from those (admittedly fewer) people from Baltic countries as I do from, e.g., the Greeks I know. The honest truth is that much of the population of Baltic countries are willing to pay a high price in order to be part of any club of which Russia is not a member. Anglo-American neoliberal hegemony? These countries say: bring it on. Germany also has a low birth rate.
This is not to say that I am claiming that there has been no cost to it: far from it, it is a crime, sacrificing growth to appease the gods of Maastricht. But the Baltics never erupted in protest against it, because they’ve consciously, knowingly chosen the gods they prefer to propitiate.
philadelphialawyer
I have always thought that the “horrors” of the Soviet satellite States was overblown. Dissidents lived to tell the tale, and many of them spent little or no time in jail. Compare and contrast with dissidents in Guatemala and El Salvador. In El Salvador, an archbishop of the RC church was not above government murder, nor were nuns, whereas in Poland the archbishops became untouchable political leaders, and one became an anti communist Pope. One lowly priest was murdered in Poland. In Guatemala, dissidents were simply rounded up and shot. The police in the East Bloc mostly used truncheons and water cannons against protestors and rioters, whereas in US satellite States, again, rioters and even protestors were simply shot down in the streets. Dissidents were more likely to lose high prestige jobs than anything else, and, guess what, folks who fundamentally dissent in the USA have a hard time keeping high prestige jobs as well.
As already mentioned, most folks had great economic security in the East Bloc. And while luxury goods and even consumer choice were limited, everyone had enough to eat, a place to live and so on.
Of course, there was no political freedom in the East Bloc, but, as mentioned, how much use is our political freedom in the USA? Sure, we can say what we like and vote and so on, but both major parties are pro banker, pro war, anti poor, and so on, and almost impossible to dislodge. Looked at objectively, can a dissident or regular person really make any more of an impact on the politics and policies of the USA than their counterpart could in the East Bloc?
Monster from the Id
Just for the halibut:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8TCyszwyWE
rkka
” The honest truth is that much of the population of Baltic countries are willing to pay a high price in order to be part of any club of which Russia is not a member. ”
Quite.
And that price is so high as to imperil the future existence of the Baltic peoples.
And the present Russian government seem to be ok with that. Back in the 1990s, the use of Baltic port and rail infrastructure for Russia’s external trade amounted to 4%-5% of their GNP. This has been diminishing rapidly as Russia develops port facilities vicinity St. Petersburg.
Further, Russia has ceased accepting the products of the Baltic fishing, dairy, and agricultural industries. For example, before the sanctions, agricultural exports to Russia amounted to 4% of GNP, which Lithuania will have trouble finding new markets for given the productivity of French farmers competing with them in the EU.
Further, I expect that Russia’s trade sanctions on the Baltic States are permanent. Why provide a livelihood to people with such ingrained hatred of you?
And so, part of the price the Baltic peoples will pay includes the loss of the customer of economic sectors that provide employment out of proportion to their (non-trivial) contribution to GNP. And since the ethnic Russian population of the Baltics is mostly urban, and the rural population mostly of the titular ethnicity, the Russian sanctions hit the titular ethnicity in each Baltic country hardest.
I hope they enjoy the fruits of their Russophobia.
Hey Skipper
How do you know this?
Never mind happiness research is squishier than an octopus, do you really mean to assert that Cuban Cubans are happier than Florida Cubans, or North Koreans happier than South Koreans?
Which perfectly accounts for why they don’t move back to their villages.
How many of those cameras are going to denounce you out of envy or spite?
Bollocks. Pure bollocks.
I visited East Berlin in 1988. It was endlessly drab, the streets full of crap cars that wouldn’t have been worth the bother to burn them in the west. Apartment blocks had no elevators, and tilted at odd angles. The GDR currency was worthless. Stores had plenty on display, but nothing for purchase.
Wikipedia has an analysis far closer reality than yours:
Many East Germans reacted positively to the dissolution of the DDR. But this reaction soon turned sour. West Germans often acted as if they had “won” and East Germans had “lost” in unification, leading many East Germans (Ossis) to resent West Germans (Wessis). Writer Ascher Barnstone finds that “East Germans resent the wealth possessed by West Germans; West Germans see the East Germans as lazy opportunists who want something for nothing. East Germans find “Wessis” arrogant and pushy, West Germans think the “Ossis” are lazy good-for-nothings.” On a more fundamental level, unification and subsequent federal policies led to serious economic hardships for many East Germans that had not existed before the Wende. Unemployment and homelessness, which simply did not exist during the socialist era, quickly became widespread; this, as well as the closures of countless factories and other workplaces in the east, fostered a growing sense that East Germans were being ignored or neglected by the federal government.
These and other effects of unification led many East Germans to begin to think of themselves more strongly as “East” Germans rather than as simply as “Germans”. In many former GDR citizens this produced a longing for some aspects of the former East Germany, such as full employment and other perceived benefits of the GDR state, termed “Ostalgie” (a blend of Ost “east” and Nostalgie “nostalgia”) and depicted in the Wolfgang Becker film Goodbye Lenin!.
Four decades of socialism is bound to leave a mark.
Hey Skipper
Unless those “no one else’s” are having to foot the bill. Among the many problems inherent in socialism is rewarding vice and penalizing virtue. Being a parasite is easy.
Have you ever been to an East Bloc country? Or the Soviet Union?
I visited the USSR, after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, before the coup. It was the most soul-suckingly awful place I have ever been. Words are insufficient to convey the pervasive decay, negligence and dejection.
And I went to the nice places.
Ian Welsh
Parasites, eh? My definition starts with Wall Street bankers and brokers, not citizens who figure they should have a job, apartment and food. Happiness and life satisfaction didn’t crash in the 90s just because West Germans were unpleasant to East Germans (especially as it also crashed in Russia and so on.)
And while I didn’t visit Russia, I did spend time in Bangladesh and India. I walked thru Calcutta slums, and so on.
There’s always worse.
Hey Skipper
Still curious about how you know this: [OP:] I’m further not surprised because there were things that East Germany, in particular, did well. To start, it did community and civic association brilliantly: There were clubs for everything, people joined them, and they enjoyed them.
Ian Welsh
Some years ago I did a lot of research into happiness in the ex-Warsaw pact areas. Unfortunately my books are currently in storage.
a very cursory Google search gives:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.2007.00597.x/full
Opportunities for volunteering go away. 37% in just 2 years.
Factories had extensive clubs and associations, and when the factories closed, those went away.
Search on “club” in this book:
http://books.google.ca/books?hl=en&lr=&id=jqDCEHyxIA4C&oi=fnd&pg=PT1&dq=East+German+clubs+happiness&ots=bDoLg6tspV&sig=Hqlpgd24r_6By5hjguI01Ce5F54#v=onepage&q=clubs&f=false
Google Scholar is your friend if you want to do your own research. There are also books on the subject, the one above (which I haven’t read), looks like it gets to the sense of community fostered by the GDR, which included vastly more socialization between citizens. This is well known to correlate to happiness. Anomie is one of the features of capitalism (see Durkheim), and is correlated with unhappiness, suicide and so on.
The need to believe that any society is or was all bad is a peculiar one. One can recognize the nasty parts of a society while recognizing the parts of it that were positive. America may lock up more people per capita than any other nation, but the chicken is cheap and there are no large line-ups, for example. (And I’ve spent plenty of time in the US.)
Though not speaking directly to clubs, this article on East Germany speaks to why some were happy there:
http://against-all-enemi.es/the-horrors-of-communism/
JustPlainDave
Hmmm. I agree with the notion that volunteering is casually linked to higher levels of happiness, but I have my doubts that past perceptions of greater volunteering opportunity are a huge factor in the Der Spiegel findings. Yes, there was a big drop in volunteering (the percentage volunteering at least monthly halved), but that wasn’t anything like the bulk of the population—monthly-plus volunteers went from 17% of the population to 9%. The notion that that’s a big driver of present findings, compared to being pissed at the generally triumphalist Westerners, I have a tough time accepting.
Quite apart from that, we’re talking about shifts in a behaviour (volunteering) that is methodologically about the toughest thing to measure via survey, being measured across societal collapse. I do this (minus the across societal collapse part) for a living and I have significant doubts. The premise of the article? Yes. The specific quantitative estimates? Much less sure of.
Hey Skipper
From “The Horrors of Communism”:
When the bullet-ridden facades disappeared, so did their subsidized rents.
There’s a hint here. It lies in the passive voice.
But why wouldn’t you pay? After all, the price was almost nothing!
I spent some time on Moscow’s underground. He’s right, the charge was practically nothing.
However, I suspect he is very confused as to the difference between price and cost.
Yes, I stood in lines in the GDR. I stood in line not because there wasn’t anything, but because they wanted to make sure as many people as possible got their share.
Good thing I wasn’t drinking Scotch at the time, because it would have ended up on the monitor. And the keyboard. And the desk. And the wall.
This is rationalization cranked to eleven. It creates motivation from result, and then insists that in a non-socialist economy, people wouldn’t have gotten their “share”, without standing in epic lines. Notice the assuming as true that which hasn’t been argued in “share”.
When I visited the USSR, I couldn’t help but notice that women younger than about 30 were beautiful. Much older than that, they had varicose veins and ulcers on their lower legs.
Why? Because they spend so many hours standing in lines to get their “share” that blood pooling left the mark of socialism.
This may be the reason that East Germans, despite many of the so-called deprivations, were happier than many of their West German cousins. The problem was, they just didn’t know it.
I’m surprised it took as long as it did. The only reason socialism doesn’t work is that people are too stupid to know it.
Really.
Never mind that happiness is one of those squishy boxes into which you can cram anything which you have decided a priori needs cramming, there is that whole correlation with suicide thing.
Prove it.
Denmark, right up there on the socialism, and happiness, scale, has a suicide rate that is barely more than one less per 100,000 than the US.
Correlation that resides five digits to the right of the decimal point might not be worth betting on.
That can’t possibly be true. Granted, in your world, the only opportunity for anything is what the state deigns to provide. However, when it comes to volunteering, the opportunity is always 100%.
For example, there are no cycling paths so clean that you can’t decide to spend some of your day picking up trash. It isn’t difficult to find shut-ins that could stand a hand with house maintenance or shopping.
It is here, though, where your research really fails you: in the US, who does the most volunteering and contributing to charities?
Ian Welsh
Shorter Skipper: no matter what people who actually lived in the GDR say, or what actual studies report, I have already made my mind up. Absent much stronger arguments than you have made, YOU are not more credible than people who lived in the GDR or than academic studies.
You are no longer welcome here.
philadelphialawyer
Hey Skipper:
“Have you ever been to an East Bloc country? Or the Soviet Union?”
Have you ever been to the moon? Well, I have and I say its made of cheese, and if you say otherwise, you’re wrong!
“I visited the USSR, after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, before the coup. It was the most soul-suckingly awful place I have ever been. Words are insufficient to convey the pervasive decay, negligence and dejection.
IOW, you claim to have gone there, at the very end, after the capitalists had already more or less killed it and started raping it, and, in your entirely subjective opinion, it was bad. Funny too, one would think that with the bad old USSR dying, folks would have been excited, looking forward to the capitalist paradise which was clearly on its way, etc.
“And I went to the nice places.”
Why of course you did! After all, you say you did, and so that’s that!