Reminder: Homosexuality was illegal in West Germany, but legal in East Germany. Among so many other reasons the East was better
something something main
Auferstanden aus Ruinen
Und der Zukunft zugewandt
I would say the DDR failed due the Stasi, which was a part of everyone’s lifes. This control was so tight that they had a informant in every appartment and also in every factory.
Also the “Order to Fire” (a policy that allows people to be shot if they try to cross the border out of the DDR) policy shouldn’t have ever existed in a proper state. If you have to build a giant wall and arm it with guards who are ready to shoot to kill just to keep people in, is it really a good place to live?
The DDR failed because the entire Eastern bloc was systematically isolated and its citizens bombarded with Western propoganda that they bought hook, line, and sinker (and later regretted, as most surveys of the post-communist period will show you). If the Stasi were the reason for the DDR’s collapse then the United States, whose NSA is more powerful and more invasive by a factor of ten (maybe even a hundred), would’ve collapsed decades ago.
The East German economy was first hindered by the Soviet Occupation Zone which claimed 60% of the industry. The Soviets didn’t offer any help to their occupation zone, but they did transfer the cost occupation to the Germans, and demanded reparations from them as well. Only by 1953 when Stalin died, were the factories returned to the GDR.
In 1953 there was a huge uprising against the SED. This uprising was the result of the attempts at a “accelerated construction of socialism in the GDR” which meant that the government would try to accelerate the transition of socialism by heavily investing in heavy industry and collectivizing agriculture. This lead to lessening of products in the civilian market, and to food prices increasing due to more wealthier farmers escaping to the west, leading to farmland being unused. And lastly the work quota increases which demanded that people worked 10% more for the same wage as before. These policies led to more people fleeing to the west, which lead to the GDR reversing course on the collectivization, and the investments on heavy industry being shifted towards consumer goods. But the quota increases weren’t reversed and stayed in effect. This lead to a protest in which the people demanded this to be reversed and that free elections were implemented. This protest had a million people in it, so it wasn’t a small protest. This protest was of course suppressed by the Soviet Army and the Stasi, who arrest over 10,000 people, and executed 32-40 people.
And during the Seven-Year plan which started in 1959 with the goal of reaching the per capita production of West Germany. And what did they implement? Increased quotas, and the emigration to the West shot up once. And since emigration increased, there were less farmers, which lead to a food shortage in the GDR.
Due to a steady industrial decline from 1959 the leader of the GDR Ultrich implemented the New Economic System (NES) in 1963, which would make the economy more decentralized, in hopes that it would reverse the course of industrial decline. The results of this new economic policy did reverse the decline, but no as much as the state wanted. And the growth was more a result of increased investment than actual improvements in the system. This failure to meet expectations lead to a new policy called Economic System of Socialism (ESS), which also failed to meet expectations, and was terminated in 1970.
So it seems that the failures of the GDR were more because of economic mismanagement than western propaganda. Of course I am open to other ideas on the topic that you could provide, but this just seems more plausible to me.
And on the CIA being worse than the Stasi, I will just give it to you, since I can’t be bothered to read more after about 2 hours of reading GDR history and economic policies, and writing this thing.
Also feel free to correct me if you think I got something wrong, or I worded something badly, since I am not a good writer by any means.
There absolutely was bad economic management by an increasingly aged political leadership, none of that can be denied. But again, that circumstance is also present in the (surprise surprise) modern day United States, where our entire political class is mostly made up of boomers and silent generation who can barely form a coherent sentence. Economic policy in the DDR could have been better, but its standard of living (measured by purchasing power, not nominal GDP) was similar to the West, its rate of income inequality far better, and life satisfaction in all aspects outside of being able to criticize the government was far and away better than the West. East Germans had a strong say in how to do their jobs, women in East Germany had far more freedom (so much so they had better sex under communism than their capitalist German peers!), and the DDR was even tolerant of homosexuality, having a state run gay bar. Life in East Germany wasn’t like the West, you couldn’t get consumer goods in mass quantities, there were coffee shortages, but nobody sent hungry, everybody had a house, everybody got a good education, and when the wall came down and East Germans realised they needed lots of cash to buy the consumer goods they wanted while their rent trebled and they lost their jobs, they by and large regretted the fall of the DDR.
The West found it much easier to get everyone to willingly install listening and tracking devices in their homes. Hey Google, who’s the CIA agent assigned to browsing my search logs today?
Social media didn’t exist back in the Cold War, and if it did, the Soviets would have restricted it for being western, and made their own which was heavily censored and monitored just like the Chinese social media.
So I don’t get why this is a western problem if the other side would have done it as well given the chance, and the Chinese are actively doing it.
Yeah, I wonder why Western social media companies spying on people is a Western problem. Truly a mystery.
Does aybody have actual stats? But from what i remember the ratio of gdp per capita between west and east germany has been more or less constant since tbe 1880s probably longer.
So the conclusion is that the gdp per calita diferences in political system were overshadowed by the effects of diffusion of the industrial revolution. And related demographic and geografic factors. While east germany was a more equal society.
