Thirty-three years after Germany’s re-unification in 1990, many people still see a divided Germany. They see West-Germany and East-Germany with East-Germany being the geographical area of the former state-socialist DDR, GDR, Deutsche Demokratische Republik or German Democratic Republic. For decades, the unified German government publishes an annual report on the progress of Germany’s unification 

Yet, more than 30 years after Germany’s so-called reunification, the average household in the West is more than twice as wealthy as the average household in the East. In short, a substantial and very recognizable inequality runs through virtually all layers of German society. 

Worse, the “wealth” of the poorest half of the East-German households is on average €12,000 or $12,750 comparable to West-German households’ which is sitting at €24,000 or $25,500 – twice as much. 

Next to geography, there is also a class or as the 107-billion-dollar-man Warren Buffett calls, a class war. The fortunes of Germany’s richest 1% are continuously growing in East and West. Yet, in 2022, it was about €3 million ($3.2 million) in the East, and €12 million ($12.8) in the West – which is four times as much!  Meanwhile, workers’ wages tell a similar story.

Even after thirty years of reunification, the average wages in East-Germany remain significantly lower than in the West. Worse, the gap has recently become even larger.

The annual salary in Eastern Germany is still on average around €12,200 ($13,000) below the average wage in West-Germany. West-Germans earn €55,797 ($60,000) in Germany’s mighty manufacturing sector. Meanwhile, East-Germans receive – on average – only €43,624 ($46,600). This corresponds to a salary difference of exactly €12,173 per year or $13,000.

In 2020, the wage gap was still at €11,967 ($12,740). Even worse is the fact that the wage gap has recently increased by €206 or $220 per year. These are the wonders of the free market that so generously came to East-Germany. In other words, if East Germany’s middle class has €12,000 less a year, it means that the recent price increases and inflation in the East will have an even more dramatic effect.

Not only in financial terms has the difference between “The East” (Ossi) and The West” (Wessi) refused to disappear. There are still substantial social, cultural, political, and historical disparities. For many in East-Germany, the word “reunification” stands for the Uber-exploitation – not just in economic terms. Simultaneously, there is a perceived under-exploitation of those democratic potentials that had emerged from East-Germany’s peaceful revolution during the autumn of 1989.

Instead of a democracy, the West-German conservatives pushed the nationalistic aspects of Germany’s reunification. The 1989 East-German slogan of, we are the people became we are one people. Most visible to East-Germans, the trumpeted nationalistic reunification was not a union of equal partners. 

Rather, the East-German Länder – local states – joined or better were absorbed by West-Germany’s Federal Republic – a kind of a remake of the Anschluss. Subsequent to East-Germany’s Anschluss to West-Germany, many West-Germans took over top positions in almost all areas of East-German society – from the economy to the judiciary, to politics and administration. All of this continues to have an effect to this day.

Worse, in almost all areas, be it in the judicial sector, in science, in the military, in business, in the media, in public administrations – almost everywhere that one looks, the proportion of East-Germans in top positions remains extremely low.

Instead, what we see today, is next to no catching-up of the East German elite who would have taken up positions in business, state, administration, culture, and the media. Worse, there is not even a slight  “adjustment” or balancing of elite positions held by Wessies and Ossies. In fact, over the last decades, this elite disparity between East and West has continued unabated.

Until today, in East-vs.-West, there are significant tensions and fractures – even three decades after the process of German reunification or Anschluss. This is further deepened by a history that played out pathways very differently between West- and East-Germany. 

Briefly, West-Germany’s post-war history was marked by Western culture and ideology, while East-Germany was marked by Russian culture, the Bolshoi, Russian movies, Russian TV, and Soviet ideology. Today, this still influences how Russia and Putin are seen in the eyes of West- and East-Germans.

East-Germans and Russia

It is not at all surprising to find that four out of ten East-Germans do not see Putin as a dictator. Meanwhile, many East-Germans have a rather positive image of Russia. Historically, the stationing of Soviet soldiers in East-Germany and the adjacent propaganda shaped, or at least influenced, everyday life in East-Germany for five decades.

For months during early 2023, plenty of East-Germans have been meeting every Monday in front of the Gethsemane Church at the historic Prenzlauer Berg of the former East-Berlin for peace rallies. 

East-German women and men carried unifying flags made up of German and Russian flags. On one banner that they were holding high, the inscription reads, this is not our war. People filled the church’s forecourt. Over a loudspeaker, songs like “Give Peace a Chance” could be heard.

Another banner with the caption Diplomacy Now! Peace! is also carried. At a peace rally in Leipzig in the East-German state of Saxony, a man demands, we need serious negotiations with Putin … how else to stop the bloodshed, the man asks, if not through conversations? 

Yet, the man says, Volodomir Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, is calling for more and more weapons. In the East-German village of Altmark (Saxony-Anhalt), one woman even believes that Ukrainians are committing a genocide of the Russians in the Donbass.

Many East-Germans have been sounding like this while expressing strong pro-Russian attitudes for over a year. According to a recent survey, half of the East-German people between Stralsund (a town in the north of East-Germany) and Sonneberg (in the south), would like closer relations with Russia. A whopping 44% would reduce or completely abolish sanctions against Russia.

Many in the West and elsewhere may ask, what’s wrong with the East-Germans?; where do these pro-Putin-East-German attitudes come from?; and who were the people of the official and state-imposed “friendship of peoples” between East-Germany and the Soviet Union? 

In any case, the closeness of East-Germans to a country that one year ago invaded its neighbor – the Ukraine – irritates not only most West-Germans, but also those East-Germans who have a more distant view of the former big socialist brother – the Russians. Beyond all that, this is not a sudden closeness to Russia but perhaps a kind of a rather sudden visibility of closeness.

To understand the pro-Russian attitude of many East-Germans, one must dig deeper into the history of East-Germany. For almost five decades – between 1945 and 1990 – about ten to twenty million Soviet soldiers served in East-Germany. About 350,000 military personnels at one time during a year were stationed in East-Germany. 

The soldiers, officers, generals, and their families often lived in areas specially created for the Soviet Armed Forces, the Red Army. In Wünsdorf near Berlin, for example, the Red Army had set up their own small town. Other Red Army personnel lived in the midst of East-Germany’s population – often as neighbors who maintained, more or less, personal contacts. 

Over the decades, East-Germans and the Russians socialized, married each other, fathered children, argued with each other, drunk Schnapps and Vodka, and enjoyed hearty East-European cuisine. As one man puts it, people drank together and even held drinking competitions against each other in local pubs.

The generations of East-Germans who experienced all this is still alive today. Yet, most of them are well over fifty years old. They are the people who primarily advocate peace negotiations – ever since the Russians’ invasion of Ukraine. 

As children and young adults, they experienced East-German state socialist propaganda – almost every day in their local kindergarten, their school, and their East-German communist youth pioneer organizations. 

For decades, they learned that the Soviet Union is our friend. America, the West, and NATO are our enemies. Some of it has stuck with them as propaganda and worked its way – in the East and in the West. And this remains despite the many cheers when the fall of the Berlin wall finally happened marking the end of East-Germany.

Resentment against West-Germany’s Establishment

Today, this induced friend-vs.-enemy thinking is often linked to the many insults coming from often rather arrogant Wessies (West-Germans) directed against Ossies or East Germans. Over the years, plenty of East-Germans have been forced to experience to be treated as second-class citizens through to this day. 

Today, this second-class-citizen resentment is also manifested in the fact that barely 13.5% of the executives in Germany’s federal administration – ministries, chancellery, the parliament, the Bundestag, etc. – are East-Germans. In other words, West-Germans run the show. The impression that West-Germans run everything is further cemented through the fact that East-German media were almost completely taken over by West German media. 

Even today, many East-German scientific institutions are still handled by Westerners. By the end of the 1990s, around 60% of all scientific staff at East-German universities had lost their jobs – many with professional connections to Russian scientific and cultural institutions. The people affected feel this as a personal insult – often to this day. Their life’s work has been destroyed by the West.

Beyond all that, decades of long-established personal, business, and economic relationships between East-German and Russian companies were broken off during the reunification or the Anschluss, and the subsequent introduction of the Deutschmark into East-Germany. 

Worse, well-known East-German companies like the Warnow shipyard in Rostock, the railway wagon builder in Görlitz, the Saxon company Foron – which, by the way, produced the first CFC-free refrigerator – were closed despite their books overflowing with orders. During the Anschluss, employees were simply dismissed – abgewickelt – rolled over and thrown out – as the Germans would say. West-Germany’s capitalist steam engine simply rolled over them. 

In the eyes of those affected, the West was and still is to blame for all this. Profitable enterprises were destroyed often needlessly. Others were eliminated to eradicate unwelcomed competitors. 

As neoliberal capitalism began to reign in East-Germany, the elimination of East-Germany’s companies was legitimized by the neoliberal ideology of competition and the free market. As a consequence of much of this, East Germany’s anger at West-Germany’s establishment remains.

These experiences have stayed even with those who have built a new life in East-Germany for themselves in recent years. It is also found in those East-Germans who had invested more heavily in Russia in recent years. Unsurprisingly, Western sanctions against Russia hit them particularly hard. This created additional anger and a renewed resentment towards the West. 

It is not uncommon to see that the feeling of being left behind once again is linked to a specific East-German identity. Not entirely unrelated, there is also a popular attitude among East-Germans that says, we – the East-Germans know the Russians better than you West Germans. We have lived with them – after all we also learned the Russian language at school.

As a consequence of all of this, East-Germans are more likely to protest against Western sanctions against Russia. And there are more calls for negotiations with Putin. Some of the pro-Russian attitudes also provide a platform for populists to go against those up there and against the state. On the latter, many East-Germans believe that the state cannot be trusted.

This widespread alienation from the state has its roots from the experiences with East-Germany state institutions – including the all-powerful secret police, the Stasi. A popular East German dictum says, if you rely on the state, you will be abandoned – verlässt du dich auf den Staat, bist du verlassen.

In the past, East-Germans experienced democracy not with state institutions, but against them. Even those who are neither left behind by the experiences of corporate bankruptcies, the impact of recent Russia sanctions, and have otherwise suffered forms of economic hardship, are coming forward to join demands for peace with Russia.

Those East-Germans often use Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other online platforms to spread the so-called “knowledge” of Russia – often imported directly from Russian state media such as Ria Novosti and Russia Today. 

Many of these East-German Russia-supporting people live in smaller East-German towns and cities and in the countryside. These geographical areas are becoming more and more depopulated and have aging populations.

In many cases, their children have moved away, often to cities and to West-Germany. Worse, they do not want to return. Yet, their intention of not returning is not even affected by the fact that their parents have bequeathed them a beautiful house with a large garden. 

Such widespread East-German feelings of abandonment might best be described as a form of mental precariat. This is a kind of diffused mixture of old and new vulnerabilities and of not completely coping with the past. These emotional concoctions are all too often blended with sheer political naivety.

Yet, there is also the fact that the children and grandchildren of today’s East-German Putin-friends and the so-called Russia-under-standers – those who claim to really understand Putin – are slowly breaking away from the rather inhibiting Ossi stereotypes and the insulting pro-Russian and anti-Western tirades of their parents. 

There is hope. Many young, the post-1989 generation of East-Germans have successful careers and have experienced democracy since 1989. While standing by their parents and grandparents, as well as their unique East-German history, these young East-Germans will change Germany – in the East and perhaps even in the West.

Thomas Klikauer is the author of German Conspiracy Fantasies – out now on Amazon!

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