In Germany's east, populist vote finds root in reunification woes

The Christian Science Monitor ^ | September 21, 2017 | Isabelle de Pommereau

[Jagermonster]

HOW OTHERS SEE IT   The anti-immigration AfD party is set for its best-ever national election Sunday, largely due to its popularity in the former East Germany. There, voters say they were left behind during reunification – and resent efforts to integrate immigrants while they still feel like second-class citizens.

GROSSDUBRAU, GERMANY—“Traitor!” “Merkel, out!” The anger, boos, and whistles greeting Angela Merkel in Germany’s east earlier this month are not the sort of reception many outside observers expect the country’s popular chancellor to receive.

But not so for people like Regina Bernstein, who lives near this small village of 4,200 at the foot of the Lusetian Mountains near the Czech Republic. She recognizes the anger, which dates back to Dec. 5, 1990. That's when the agency overseeing East Germany’s transition into unified Germany declared that the local factory, called Margarethenhütte, wouldn’t compete in the free economy, and laid off its 850 workers.

For more than 130 years, Margarethenhütte manufactured ceramic insulators for power lines, which by 1991 it sold everywhere from Sweden to South Africa. But for Ms. Bernstein, who worked there as a ceramic engineer, her bitterness over its closure was about more than the loss of job or history.

“It’s not only our jobs that were taken but our dignity,” Bernstein, who now owns a pottery studio, says. All the things she had worked for were undermined: her qualifications, the system of all-day school that had helped her combine family and work – her entire system of values. “We felt humiliated, degraded, taken advantage of,” she says. “This arrogance, it sits deep and it’s passed on when it remains unfiltered.”

[Jagermonster]

Excerpted per rules.

Says an East German protestor, “You and your refugees! It’s all about refugees! But why don’t you integrate us first?”

[2ndDivisionVet]

Probably what we’ll be hearing from the former North Koreans twenty years from now.

[DoughtyOne]

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President Donald J. Trump's address to the United Nations on 09/19/2017.

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[Jagermonster]

I hope not, but the situations are awfully similar. I think it may just take until the generation that has grown up in reunified Germany is in charge of everything - nobody left to remember the division except retirees.

[Dr. Sivana]

Probably what we’ll be hearing from the former North Koreans twenty years from now.

No, the East Asians have ZERO interest in bringing in folks from other parts of the world.

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[BBell]

His son turned to the neo-Nazi scene – his revenge on the system, Mr. Gude says. Gude adds that “the memories of the nice times in socialist times and my family have helped me.”

I guess it takes progressive liberals to turn formally oppressed communists into NAZIs.

[BBell]

I should have typed elitist progressive liberals.