Some day the twain may meet
The FameWorks were in East Germany last week. Or more accurately, in the eastern part of Germany - what was, before 1990, the socialist DDR. People of a certain vintage will recall, in hazy Kodak Instamatic, peering over the border from the safe Germany that usually won the World Cup, into the exotically communist other Germany that bulked out its athletes for Olympic glory.
When one visits today, there are few obvious clues that this was for several decades a separate country. It’s not as though the streets are aloud with chuntering two-stroke Trabants or the vending machines plopping out bottles of luridly coloured socialist Vita Cola.
Yet the eastern context is different. The east overindexes significantly on anti-vax, pro-Putin and anti-immigrant sentiment. The far right AfD that freely adopts Nazi symbolism at its rallies is likely to be the biggest party in the east in the forthcoming federal elections, with profound consequences for the nation’s future (and perhaps Europe’s future too).
It's been easy to take for granted these past few years that reunification would see the east happily subsumed through some kind of manifest destiny into the economically more powerful west. But many in the east still refer not to reunification, and instead to die Wende (the change.) We in the west may assume that the fall of the Wall represented a rapturous and definitive liberation without downsides from a repressive state that centrally planned your life, knocked on your door at 3am and tapped your phone; but many among the east’s ageing population will have more nuanced memories of the post ‘90 period. Of being put to work dismantling the factories in which they had once toiled for humanity’s progress. Of teachers being forced back to university to gain western qualifications despite having years of experience. Of skilled professional women advancing in their careers suddenly deprived of the free childcare that was once granted without question. It’s not that there’s overwhelming support for the restoration of socialism; more a kind of lingering trauma. And an overwhelming sadness as smaller, rural communities slowly bleed out.
What this all suggests is that understanding any culture and its people can never involve simply a snapshot of the present; it requires us to look into their collective past experiences, and the contexts against which their lives, and even those of their forebears, have been played out to date. Perhaps we can claim we were in East Germany after all.