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The East Germans and democracy: Appearance and reality

2022-04-14T15:42:04.421Z


According to a new study, almost half of East Germans believe they live in a "sham democracy." That has to do with the unresolved experience of dictatorship – but also with western paternalism.


Enlarge image

Opponents of the corona measures with the German flag, Leipzig, November 6, 2021

Photo: Sebastian Willnow / dpa

A new survey recently made headlines: "Almost every third German believes they live in a 'sham democracy'," read the title.

That was the result of a representative nationwide Allensbach survey commissioned by SWR.

There was also what one suspected as East Germans socialized under the dictatorship and tested by debate: the difference between East and West is particularly large.

While 28 percent of West Germans believe they live in a "sham democracy," as many as 45 percent of East Germans agree.

"Appearance and reality," East German sociologist Steffen Mau tweeted.

There is a poem by Wilhelm Busch with the same title:

»How would you try to overcome yourself/ Short way to get to


the bottom of people/


You only know them from the outside/


You only see the waistcoat/


Not the heart.«

He wrote that about 150 years ago.

Democracy with values ​​such as free elections, pluralism of opinion and equal rights is apparently just the packaging for almost every second East German. Under the vest, as Busch would say, one finds a dark heart, a dictatorship or an oligarchy.

The survey seems to confirm the general feeling, confirmed by long discussions about dictatorship-social Ostbürger: East and West are drifting apart, the East cannot be saved, after two years of the pandemic it is getting more and more caught up in the clutches of "lateral thinkers" and AfD.

I remembered recently reading an excerpt from an interview with East German journalist and activist Melanie Stein.

She said it was like an outing for many young people to identify themselves as East Germans.

She tells of the woman who writes to her on Instagram that she is more likely to identify as a lesbian than as an East German.

Or a manager who says she must first ask her family if she dares to identify herself.

I can understand that when you work in an environment where there are hardly any East Germans and when you constantly have to justify yourself.

For East German enemies of democracy, for example, who cannot shake off the dictatorship.

But what actually is a sham democracy?

The word is older than the GDR.

The famous sociologist Max Weber used the term as early as 1917 for an analysis of the Russian Revolution.

From the early days of the founding of the second German state, Walter Ulbricht, the communist and later head of state and government of the GDR, said: "It has to look democratic, but we have to have everything under control."

If you take a closer look at Allensbach's poll, things get more complicated.

And less somber.

The study examined the extent to which politically radical thinking and the tendency to conspiracy theories are pronounced.

One thousand people aged 16 and over were interviewed in the first two weeks of February, before the Ukraine war.

In order to ask about trust in democracy, the respondents were presented with 26 theses, ranging from more left-wing positions such as "Capitalism means exploitation" to liberal statements such as "Nothing creates more prosperity than a functioning market economy" to right-wing opinions such as "If we are not careful, Germany will become a Islamic country.« One of the theses was: »We only seem to live in a democracy.

In fact, the citizens have no say.” 31 percent nationwide agreed.

In the reporting it became: Almost every third German believes to live in a sham democracy.

As already mentioned, the gap between East and West was particularly large on this question.

Why is that?

And is the gap getting bigger due to the corona crisis?

Phone call to study director Thomas Petersen von Allensbach.

He has been conducting surveys on political attitudes in Germany for many years.

Is the number of those who distrust or reject democracy increasing in East Germany?

He couldn't confirm that, says Petersen.

That there is a different perspective on democracy and the relationship between state and citizen between East and West is nothing new.

In the 1990s, the differences in attitudes were even more serious, and East and West are now converging.

In his opinion, the survey results show the long-term after-effects of the GDR dictatorship, which will continue to be seen for a few years to come.

The values ​​you picked up when you were young shape your whole life.

“Democracy has to be practiced over decades.

That also took 50 years in West Germany after the war in 1945,” says Petersen.

This comparison is a more often formulated view that is not wrong, but it describes only part of the problem.

Because the East Germans have their own history, they are not just the latecomers of the West German brothers and sisters.

1945 is not the same as 1989. The system change in 1989 was not enforced militarily, but was fought for peacefully and democratically by many GDR citizens.

In the period leading up to reunification, many new forms of citizen participation emerged; newspapers, citizens' committees and round tables were founded.

Then came reunification, the time for experimentation ended, the civil rights activists soon no longer played a major role, and they hardly gave any impetus.

Many citizens got the feeling that they were only needed as consumers.

As a consumer of Western goods, aid money and parties in which East Germans hardly played a role.

Right-wing extremism spread, was ignored, should take hold.

There is still a great distance to the parties today.

In West Germany, too, many have now left the large popular parties.

The Ostler didn't even enter.

The Federal Government Commissioner for East Germany, Carsten Schneider, also explains this with the experience of reunification: »For many East Germans, 1989 is the political experience they have learned: change through taking to the streets.

But joining a party, working on the city council or the local council, actually being able to change something, many have not experienced that," he told the "Tagesspiegel".

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And even if they get involved, 30 years after reunification, they will face West German superiority.

Because many West German MPs use the East German constituencies as a stepping stone, writes sociologist Denis Huschka in an article for the Berliner Zeitung.

According to his investigations, every fifth "East German" member of parliament is in fact a West German who has moved there and has a constituency in the East.

In Brandenburg even every third.

Huschka criticizes the fact that the comparatively weaker East German local and state associations, which were only founded in 1989, were and are in some cases misused as mandate procurement institutions for “Western imports”.

»The West German help for the East German associations, which was certainly sensible at first in terms of organisation, finance and personnel, has developed a life of its own.«

In this way one can also agree with the statement: »We only apparently live in a democracy.

In fact, the citizens have nothing to say” as a drastically formulated criticism of party democracy, which is often perceived as the West German superiority.

You can understand it as a desire for more design options, more grassroots democratic elements.

That would not be a reason for resignation, but a work order.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2022-04-14

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