Posted on 11/09/2009 3:41:40 PM PST by inflorida
For many in the GDR, the fall of the Berlin Wall and unification meant the loss of jobs, homes, security and equality
On 9 November 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down I realised German unification would soon follow, which it did a year later. This meant the end of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the country in which I was born, grew up, gave birth to my two children, gained my doctorate and enjoyed a fulfilling job as a lecturer in English literature at Potsdam University. Of course, unification brought with it the freedom to travel the world and, for some, more material wealth, but it also brought social breakdown, widespread unemployment, blacklisting, a crass materialism and an "elbow society" as well as a demonisation of the country I lived in and helped shape. Despite the advantages, for many it was more a disaster than a celebratory event.
Just two examples. My best friend, a foreign languages teacher, lost her job and was blacklisted because, at the time the wall fell, she happened to be teaching at a government law college. She was not a member of the party or indeed political at all. After much effort she managed to find a job helping young people excluded from school, with no long-term contract and on a much lower salary. My brother, who has a PhD in the philosophy of science, lost his research job at the academy and ever since has only been able to find odd, low-paid temporary jobs.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Good to see that most of the comments are putting the Commie who wrote this tripe in their place.
The Guardian also had an tearjerker eulogy for Saddam Hussein after he got the rope.
Bolshevik rag.
I’m sure Obama has a place for her in his administration. It will be just like old times.
Communism attracts the otherwise unemployable at the expense of those who would otherwise be free.
Anybody who ever was in East Germany and/or ever looked down the wall from Checkpoint Charlie, knows the East Germans didn’t have much to lose!
And Nazi Germany was great if you were a member of the Party.
“Unfortunately, the collapse of the GDR and “state socialism” came shortly before the collapse of the “free market” system in the west.”
Yeah, I’d probably hear that statement here in the USA on many campuses as well.
She went from being one of the few winners under communism, to being one of the tens of thousands of unemployed, or under-employed, PhD / terminal degree’d professors in the West. No doubt those old winners do hate this new system.
I gotta wonder what happened to all of those East German Olympic judges. Perhaps they later went on to count votes in Chicago?
Speaking with a young German woman this past winter who was born in East Berlin, she said that when she looks back at her life as a child in the east versus her teen years and present as a westerner, it is as though life went from black and white to color.
One thing I appreciate about British newspapers is that they don't even pretend to be unbiased. The Guardian is a leftist newspaper and they make no effort to disguise this fact.
The best scene in the movie was near the end when Dreyman confronts the former Party Bigwig and tells him, “To think people like you used to run a country.”
Also interesting.
Oh, poor baby. You actually have to work for a living now instead of sucking the blood out of other people trying to get ahead in life under the communists. However, you are not alone. There are lots of former party faithful higher-ups just like you who no longer can take advantage of their fellow Germans.
Very good description. It is a shame that this generation is developing a nostalgic yearning for black and white based on pure ignorance.
Of course he misses it. He was part of the GDR bourgeois and all the perks that accompany it.
I am sure most of them would like to aspire once more to someday own a used trabbie, and to enjoy the sheer exhilaration of wondering if they had done anything to offend the Stasi.
Dude its not like captialism has done any better. Captialism is loose cannon right now, full of incomptence
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