…and they usually can’t name anything after that. Some people might mention the Stasi but that’s pretty rare. I guess you’d have a number of people like me that were raised evangelical who were told even owning a Bible in East Germany was illegal (it wasn’t) and churches were banned (they weren’t); but that’s such obvious bullshit I won’t even address it here.
So when you ask US Americans about East Germany, the wall is the first thing that they will say, every time. It’s the hallmark of why they (and communism in general) were “bad”. East Germany doesn’t have a leader they know about like Stalin or Mao. It doesn’t have a scary name for “prisons” like “gulag”. And it doesn’t have a famine that anticommunists can exaggerate and blame on communism. But they do have a wall.
OK, in the ~30 years of the Berlin Wall’s existence, do you know how many people were killed trying to cross it?
Not millions. Not tens of thousands. 140. Over a 30 year period. US Americans have no idea this is the actual number. Instead, we have movies like Bridge of Spies. In that movie, Tom Hanks is in a train going over to the eastern side of Berlin. And in the four seconds the train is above the zone behind the wall, of course they show someone crossing the wall getting shot. Despite the fact that there would have been only say 4-5 people that would have happened to in a given year across the length of the whole wall, not just the spot Hanks’ character was at. The odds of that happening at that exact spot at that exact time were a million to one. But that doesn’t stop Hollywood from including it.
But yeah, the GDR is evil and terrible for killing 140 people. I’m sure there were individual months where Obama droned more innocent civilians than that. But the US is the good guys, right? That’s the worst the US can come up with about the GDR. 140 people. The US can slaughter innocents by the millions but that’s not evil because reasons. Wall bad, agent orange good.
And of course, US Americans never learn about the reasons for building the wall in the first place. The US and FRG used West Berlin as a major base of operations for spying and sabotage into the Eastern Bloc. Something had to be done, or the CIA et al would continue to use West Berlin as an easy access point. I’m pretty sure the wall’s main purpose was keeping folks out more than in. And yes, brain drain out of the GDR was a problem. The west absolutely pumped people in the GDR with (not necessarily incorrect for labor aristocrats) notions that they could be pretty well off in the west. Was the wall the right solution for that? Probably not, but I’m not in their shoes and I can see why they did it.
Now, about the Stasi. It’s a great word, like “gulag”. It sounds scary, right? Most US Americans aren’t familiar with it, but the dedicated anti-communists will always bring it up. Do you know what the secret police in the FRG were called? Probably not, but don’t feel bad. It’s not like we were ever taught about them. But the FRG did have their own secret police, and they acted with as much impunity as the Stasi, just against leftists. Meanwhile, in the GDR… as long as you weren’t a CIA asset, a Nazi, or advocated against the working class (i.e. for capitalism)… the Stasi had no interest in you. Yes, they collected a lot of info on folks. But I’m sure the data profile that Facebook or Google have on most Americans would put the Stasi to shame. And those corporations have zero problems handing that info off to law enforcement in order to put you in the slammer. But Americans think this is perfectly ok because Facebook and Google are pRiVaTE coRpOrAtiOnS, and corporations aren’t able to limit our freedoms. Not to mention, I remember seeing some post-unification polls of East Germans about the things they didn’t like about life there, and the Stasi was waaaay down on the list.
Basically, US Americans are the most deeply propagandized people on the planet. The capitalists built up these scary communist boogeymen that were apparently so evil. But when you learn the truth, you see that on their worst days, East Germany was still a far better country than the US could hope to be on it’s best day.
Bridge of Spies is a good movie, it portrays the hogs in America pretty well and the Soviet spy is the honorable yet nonchalant character.
It is crazy to me how many “leftists” eat this shit up. A wall in one city, that’s peak evil right there. meanwhile we annex territory and put up walls in areas the UN itself says are Palestinian lands.
also liberals: those murdered palestinians were no angels, they walked near a wall
But Americans think this is perfectly ok because Facebook and Google are pRiVaTE coRpOrAtiOnS, and corporations aren’t able to limit our freedoms.
This is a massive brainworm carried by millions of people. Take the archetypal pocket-constitution Libertarian for instance. These folks put the Constitution - particularly the Bill of Rights - up on a pedestal. Their conclusion about everything that ails the US (strictly what impacts them personally) is essentially “Real America has never been tried. The Bill of Rights is being violated. If we could only restore Constitutional rule, everything would be fixed.”
But these Constitution Experts :expert-shapiro: know that the Constitution only limits what the government is allowed to do. The Constitution makes no demands that speech must be protected on private property. It makes no demands that private property must guard against unreasonable searches. It makes no demand that private property must offer due process. By limiting the power of the government proper, we are only expanding the unrestrained power of the state, which is actually composed of multinational corporations, monopolies, rent seekers, and Epstein Island perverts.
Idk. I know a few leftwing Czech and East German critics of capitalism who lived through the fall of the wall as adults and who talk about it. There are things they miss, but none take such a rosey view as you propose, for the most part due to the money and goods that flooded into both countries but also because of a sense of a new political freedom (illusory maybe). I think in the former USSR maybe there is more of a view that the 90s were an unambiguous tragedy
Right, I’m in the USA so I have to couch everything I say with I’m speaking at a distance and I can only rely on what I read about or watch. That said, I find all sorts of conflicting information of how “good” things were back then, why the communist governments collapsed, etc. I have not seen anyone yet provide a good synthesis of all these perspectives. Certainly not the capitalist “see capitalism is so much better than communism, that’s why capitalism won”. And the other extreme - that the Eastern Bloc made few mistakes in implementing socialism and it was all the fault of western sabotage". Trying to figure out as much as I can myself.
I’m pretty sure the wall’s main purpose was keeping folks out more than in.
I’m pretty sure the wall’s main purpose was keeping people from fleeing. Here’s what it looked like. See how it faces in rather than out. If you want a wall to keep people out, you put the barriers in front of it, not behind it.
Yeah the GDR had a brain drain problem is what I’ve been told. Lots of doctors leaving.
Also I believe the USSR and allies weren’t in favor of the Berlin wall at its construction.
Communist countries invested in people over capital. If a person fled west they took their investment with them so to speak.
Funnily enough, racism trumped anticommunism. Many potential migrants from VN & China were discouraged because westerners didnt recognise their degrees. (That probably changed in the past decade ).
And its changed back now that America is going after Chinese academics and fomenting racism against Chinese people in general, many Chinese students are choosing to study locally instead of going to the US, and many Chinese researchers in America (including naturalized citizens) are considering returning to China. The first cold war led to Qian Xuesen leaving the US and helping the PRC develop their first nuke. I wonder what other advancements China will make owing to this round of reverse brain drain.
I wonder how much overlap there is between knee jerk hatred of the DDR and contemporary “BUILD THE WALL” chuddery.
It isn’t an evil wall when we do it! :frothingfash:
I remember stories of people having to sneak radios because the communists banned western music. I don’t know how much truth there was to that but I remember hearing about that all the time before I even knew what the GDR was.
I don’t know how much truth there was to that
I mean, for all intents and purposes, the modern day equivalent might be that people have to sneak the fact that they pirate music because it’s illegal. Something that doesn’t impact the average pirate’s life at all because it isn’t policed at all. Probably very much the same in the GDR, if such a ban did exist.
Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier :wholesome:
I’m very much in agreement, but you’re probably underestimating some of the Stasi’s excesses here.
Some of the shit they did if you made the wrong music or wore the wrong clothes, even if you were a committed communist and supporter of the party was fucked up. Their foundation as a group with wide power to fight Nazis and the nature of siege socialism really did warp them as an organisation in the long term, as the Nazi threat faded.
They were better than the CIA and Hoover’s FBI, but bad enough to be a real critique of the DDR that most East Germans would agree with and something we should look to avoid.
That’s fair, yes I was probably giving them a bit too much credit. I like how you mentioned the nature of siege socialism, I think that provides helpful context (I didn’t really want to get into the Stasi but I felt if I didn’t mention it folks would bring up that they hear about the Stasi a lot too in addition to the wall).
I’d also like to add that the “Corrupt Party Aristocracy” is a common anti-communist talking point pushed both in the US and Germany today, which is why Rammstein felt the need to include a scene of DDR officials indulging in some fine champagne like shameless college partygoers in their recent-ish Deutschland music video. Nevermind that this talking point is pushed in countries where the lifestyles of billionaires and their millionaire political representatives would put all that to shame. This isn’t to say that corruption wasn’t a thing within WP communist governments (like in Poland) but it speaks to how people will so soon forget about their problems at home so long as you point to a similar problem but coat it in a paint of the “Other”.
IDK the numbers for East Germany, bu I do know that the richest Soviets were only something like six times wealthier than the average citizen. The perks for high level officials of having a nice housing bloc and a private store are so minor compared to what the rich in America can expect - nevermind the fact that nobody in that system was born into a high level Party position. Though some western propagandists will argue that Stalin “owned” the entire Soviet state when he was in charge of it, and therefore calculate that he was the richest man in history.
GOOD post
I mean, ok, but we don’t need to be hype that “only” 140 people were summarily executed by the state for the crime of crossing a border
Wasn’t summarily executed though. Of course I am against borders, but the narrative that it is worse to lock people in the country (where they can move freely) than to keep others out is bullshit. The tens of thousands of people who drowned in the subterranean sea is objectively more evil than what the GDR wall was. Similar: The support and the teaching of the people who tortured and killed tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and in total millions of labeled leftist sympathisants in Southern America, in South East Asia and Africa by the US is worse.
While we don’t calculate life against life the military industrial prison complex of the US gets away with a clean west in comparison if you ask the media.
I don’t applaud summary executions, but have trouble with hyping up moral judgement against a state and thus institutions which don’t hold power anymore while women are murdered in the FRG sometimes without recurse, when the chancellor of Germany is responsible that a person in Hamburg got tortured to death as direct consequence of him being Mayor there.
Wasn’t summarily executed though.
You’re right; they were shot while trying to escape.
A summary execution means they were accused of a crime.
they were shot while trying to escape.
Or killed by the automatic devices, or drowned or died falling from their escape routes.
140 people died in connection with escaping the wall, 101 people fleeing the GDR, 30 people who didn’t want to flee out of the GDR or FRG who were killed, 8 people on border duty
there were 133 law suits against around the double amount of people, around 50% were convicted
In August 2001 the head of the party for democratic socialism (the successor to the SED and some left wing organisations, who later formed with others the party The Left / Die Linke) said: “The shootings at the wall are unjustifiable and are a violation of human rights”.
Klaus Brueske, born 14. Sep. 1938, died 18. Apr. 1962 tried to escape with a truck and died after breaking through the border crossing U Heinrich-Heine-Straße (were the KitKat/Sage club is nowadays) and causing an accident at the crossing with the regular traffic within the FRG
stalin shouldn’t have stopped at berlin
