Over Three Decades Since Reunification, Germany Is Still Fract | Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)

Over Three Decades Since Reunification, Germany Is Still Fractured

An interview with Steffen Mau

October 3, 1990, saw the reunification of Germany. But more than 30 years later, inequalities are deeper than ever and Easterners are angered at the promises that weren’t realized.

Between the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 2019 and the anniversary of German reunification last October, the German-language book market was met with a flood of titles purporting to reexamine the historical relationship between East and West Germany and evaluate Easterners’ status post-reunification.

One of the most noteworthy was Lütten Klein: Leben in der ostdeutschen Transformationsgesellschaft by sociologist Steffen Mau. Drawing on a wide range of sources as well as his own experience growing up in Lütten Klein a model district of the port city of Rostock Mau’s book charts the rise of the German Democratic Republic and the society it nurtured from its founding in the late 1940s to its collapse. It explores the complexities of the relationship between the population and the ruling Socialist Unity Party, identifies the social groups and structures that consolidated over the decades, and explores the rhythms of life in East Germany’s rapidly growing cities.

After sketching out the East German social structure pre-1989, Mau shows how the traumas of reunification collapse of the political system and public sphere, wholesale privatization of the economy, mass unemployment and outmigration impacted different sections of the population. He paints a picture of a region marked by stark “social fractures” between a handful of booming cities and vast rural zones abandoned to decline and depopulation. This frustration among East Germans, compounded by a distrust of elites inherited from the GDR, has ultimately created the conditions in which right-wing populism can flourish.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/10/german-reunification-east-west-berlin-wall-anniversary