A lot of the reason why many east Germans dreamt of life in the west was the belief that they could have a higher standard of living there. While the idea that everyone in the west was driving BMW’s and wearing Levi’s jeans was naive and rosy it is true that the west was richer than the east.
Liberals will mystify this difference with lazy idealist notions of capitalism being more dynamic or whatnot. A more materialist explanation can be found by comparing the conditions for economic development of the east and the west.
For centuries before WWII eastern Europe has a history of being less developed than western Europe. The fighting on the eastern front was much more intense and vicious than on the western front, leaving eastern Europe more destroyed after the war than western Europe.
After the war, western Europe was placed in the orbit of the United States, the only major industrial economy left unharmed by the war, whereas eastern Europe was aligned with the USSR who had seen significant destruction during the war. The Americans realised that the best way to preserve their foothold in Europe was to make western Europe economically comfortable so communism would not look like an attractive alternative and gave capitalist states in Europe aid and access to trade. The USSR was facing a gargantuan reconstruction effort at home and was unable to provide the same kind of aid.
On top of all that western Europe was and is part of the metropol of an imperialist system, enabling the western European bourgeoisie to extract superprofits from the global south, further deepening the wealth gap between east and west.
This isn’t to say that the AES countries in eastern Europe didn’t make mistakes and had problems of their own making. They did, but even with the best management imaginable they wouldn’t have been able to become as wealthy as the west.
