TODAY marks the 25th anniversary of German reunification. Was it the euphoric success story trumpeted by the German Establishment and reiterated by the British media?

Germany today appears to be a uniformly prosperous state, but on the territory of the former German Democratic Republic we find the highest unemployment rate in the country, particularly in rural areas and among women. You see new houses being built in many areas but, at the same time, deserted villages.

Thousands of young people have been forced to move to the western part of Germany to find jobs. A whole generation of highly qualified people have been sidelined and forced to take alternative work. Some 50 per cent have had to retrain in order to find new employment.

How did this happen? The election of the last GDR government in 1989 — supposedly the first free election in the country — was marked by blatant interference by the West German government and the ruling CDU party, which spent millions of Deutschmarks in order to get the result they wanted.

What resulted was a conservative government which could be steamrollered into accepting what was in essence an annexation, rather than the union of two separate sovereign states.

What came afterwards was certainly not the paradise that had been promised by the West German Establishment. The whole of the GDR’s industry and manufacturing infrastructure was dismantled, closed down and sold off at knock-down prices by a so-called “trusteeship” body.

This process was characterised by corruption, incompetence and even criminality. Its aim was to destroy any potential competition for West German businesses and to create a new and lucrative market. The result was devastating.

About half the GDR’s 14,000 scientists and researchers had worked in research and development in large enterprises.

With the destruction of industry or the radical downsizing of even successful firms, research in industry was reduced by 50 per cent within a year of unification and today R&D is hardly carried out at all on the territory of the former GDR.

There was political vetting of every employee in education. All staff had to complete questionnaires asking for detailed information on their former party affiliations, political opinions and activities. This amounted to a McCarthy-style witch-hunt. As a result, 75,000 teachers lost their jobs and were blacklisted. This seemed a convenient way of reducing the number of teachers, since class sizes in GDR schools were smaller than in the federal republic, and in universities the ratio of lecturers to students was 1:5 against 1:18 in the Federal Republic.

The closing down of academic institutions and university departments as well as political vetting resulted in more than one million people with a university degree or its equivalent losing their jobs.

This constituted 50 per cent of that group. It meant that, percentage-wise, following unification the eastern part of Germany had the highest unemployment rate for university graduates in the world. Leading scientists were forced to go abroad or accept fixed-term contracts, and a considerable number had to take early retirement. All university chancellors, directors of state enterprises, research institutes and even museums lost their jobs and many were blacklisted.

All this amounted to a complete destruction of the GDR’s scientific research potential, a terrible intellectual haemorrhage from universities and colleges — in essence a complete eradication of 40 years of the GDR’s accumulated experience and history.

Women in particular were hit hard by the consequences of unification. In the GDR, a majority were highly skilled — only 6 per cent had no qualifications at all, as against 24 per cent of West German working women. In the GDR, 50 per cent of all jobs in medicine and law were carried out by women and a third of women worked in technical professions.

Given the great importance that work represented to women in terms of their identity, unemployment on the scale that happened after unification had a devastating effect. Even after 20 years, on the territory of the former GDR, two-thirds of the unemployed are women and they make up 70 per cent of the long-term unemployed.

Even since unification, the GDR has been continually and systematically demonised in the German media, with horror stories of the Stasi, fabulations about how rotten the economy was, how a whole people lived for 40 years under an oppressive totalitarian system. There has been a concerted attempt to distort the history of the GDR and eradicate all positive experience or the idea that a socialist society is possible.

Former GDR citizens have been repeatedly told that they lived a lie for 40 years and that nothing they did or experienced was worthwhile. Even today, 25 years on, GDR citizens are still being treated as second-class citizens. Many are still paid lower wages for doing the same jobs as their West German counterparts and their pensions are lower too.

What you won’t hear in the media is the fact that the German government has put far more effort into eradicating the legacy of the GDR than in dealing with the fascist period of German history.

The German agency for investigating nazi crimes had, at the height of its activity, five full-time employees. In comparison, the authority examining Stasi files has more than 3,000 employees, has cost billions of euros and is still continuing its work.

Despite a long and avid search for evidence and the prosecution of former Stasi officials, only a handful have been convicted of any crime. Concrete evidence of serious mistreatment of individuals by the Stasi has been minimal.

The GDR was a small country of stark contradictions. It was an artificial state created on a third of the territory of the German nation. Two states grew up alongside each other, bound by family, cultural and national ties, but divided by politics and ideology along cold war lines.

It was a country that attempted to build socialism while facing a much larger and hostile capitalist nation on its western border and, at its back to the east, a dominating Soviet Union. It did not really conform to its self-description as a socialist workers’ state, but nor was it a uniformly oppressive, totalitarian dictatorship.

Many aspects of life in the GDR reflected genuine socialist elements, while others were subject to authoritarian interference and a rigid paternalism. There was guaranteed social security, material support and social stability, even though there were also many petty restrictions on people’s freedoms.

Despite everything, this small country made considerable advances and, above all, proved that a different society with different values is possible. Some of the most significant achievements include:
- The abolition of class privilege and greater income equality
- Eliminating land and property speculation
- Restricting the influence of banks and other large financial institutions
- Equal rights for women
- Access to education for all
- Promotion of the co-operative idea.

Over the two decades since the demise of the GDR, many of those who lived in the country have come to recognise and regret that the genuine social achievements they enjoyed have been dismantled. It is perhaps little wonder that many East Germans do not feel there has been a unification of two states, but that they have been taken over and treated as a colony of the West.

Western researchers have noted that, in the recollections of many of those who lived in the GDR, the socialist state is seen largely positively. This has been widely dismissed as “Ostalgie” — nostalgia for the east — suggesting a rosy yearning for a mythical life in the GDR.

However, those from East Germany have the advantage that they are able to compare both systems because they have experienced life in both. In retrospect, they now see particular aspects of GDR society as more significant when compared to life in the West.

In a number of surveys, ex-GDR citizens describe life as lived in the GDR more positively than negatively. On the positive side they mention full employment, social security, career opportunities for women, satisfaction in the workplace and anti-fascism. Negative associations were restriction on travel, scarcity of consumer goods and domination by the ruling Socialist Unity Party.

The Western media’s denigration of the GDR experience is not aimed at a genuine historical evaluation, but is part of a general and ongoing campaign to eradicate the very idea that a socialist society can be built and that the GDR experience provides valuable lessons.

• John Green is co-author with Bruni de la Motte of Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? The German Democratic Republic and What Became of It.