“We never worried about not having a place to live or a job, or about being evicted. There were no worries or fears about our livelihoods and there was so much in the way of culture and recreation that was available most of the time at little or no cost.”
She said that “attempts were always made not only that you had a job but that it was the best job you could do and whenever possible a job you really liked.”
Zastrow explained that she disliked the technical aspects of her schooling, despite the fact that they were providing her with skills that were quite useable. “I love animals,” she said, “and really wanted to have a career working with them.” She described how “there were needs for everything in the GDR, for people who could do all kinds of things and they worked to get me a job that I loved, a job on a large agricultural dairy collective where I had such good times working with more than 300 cows!”
Growing up in a society with human values and growing old in late capitalist neoliberal hellworld has gotta be
better to have socialismed than never to have socialismed at all
i mean fuck me I’m riding the neoliberal collapse of the earth in my prime years
Beer brew here oooh earth rider thanks for the great lakes
Ad now a lot of them are aggressively racists and AfD keeps winning eastern states. Seeing your country gutted by capitalists and turning around and saying “actually it’s the Turkish and Syrian people down the street’s fault”
If you look at votes by demographic all the people that would have actual memories of the GDR vote a lot more moderate than all the people that were brought up in the 90s
Propaganda is a hell of a drug.
your country
That’s exactly the problem though. Capitalists can simply claim they’re on the proles’ side because they are Germans too. It’s that depressingly easy. Just feed people nationalism.
Yup. There’s a (lib) theatre group that did an experiment in Estonia, where they made a fake political party that had no policies, promises, or even political history… just beyond parody nationalist performativity and ‘pretty’ looking politicians.
They went from nothing at all in politics to polling at 25% of the vote at one point.
We never worried about not having a place to live or a job, or about being evicted. There were no worries or fears about our livelihoods and there was so much in the way of culture and recreation that was available most of the time at little or no cost.”
She said that “attempts were always made not only that you had a job but that it was the best job you could do and whenever possible a job you really liked.”
This article was great, thanks for posting!
Grossman’s biggest accolades were reserved for what the GDR did regarding housing and elimination of poverty. “Everyone had a home,” he said. “Rents were very low and you could never be evicted. It was unheard of, and the GDR was really the first place to ever completely eradicate poverty.”
Welcome!
And the youth claim the elderly view it favorably because of nostalgia.
I too would be nostalgic for a time where opportunities were everywhere and you couldn’t be evicted.
What I usually hear is that the elderly are only nostalgic because they grew up during that time and so they see it with rose-tinted glasses
Very much recommend this episode of Proles of the Round Table on the GDR. Fascinating listen. I found this article when trying to hunt down a quote they mention that I think was this one.
“They never were able to take well any public criticism of the leadership,” he said. “You could criticize your boss on the job, the way things were set up there, you could criticize delays or bureaucratic glitches. Of course in America, you can criticize the political leaders but watch out if you criticize your boss or the people who run your company.”
ummm ackshually east germany was an evil authoritarian hellhole where everyone was being eaten by gorillas every day or else they get eaten by Stalin and everyone cheered and ascended to godhood when the USSR fell.
But the gorillas starved too eventually because the humans weren’t well fed, some pictures have survived of gorillas protesting against the Stalin regime right before its collapse
Then why is the former GDR territory today such a reactionary shithole? Rampant racism, homophobia and support for the fascist AfD party. I have a hard time believing that this was such a progressive place just 30+ years ago.
Generational difference apparently, older people are more likely to be nostalgic for the Soviets, people born since 1989 are more likely to be fascists https://hexbear.net/comment/4984330
When the wall fell the GDR basically experienced Shock Therapy like the former Soviet union states. Everything was privatized, property was seized, safety nets were dissolved. Poverty became so rampant that children born during that time period exhibited stunted growth similar to children raised during famines.
most social structures in eastern germany were organized within the workplace, factories had film and music-clubs for example and all of that virtually disappeared overnight when those workplaces became privatized.
West Germans even embraced a silly psychologization epithet rather than accept that so many Eastern Germans preferred life in the GDR: Ostalgie.
I participated in a course last year that was on east german cinema during the last few years of the countries existence (lots of really fantastic films) and one of the biggest revelations came when we watched some documentary from the 2000s that interviewed some experimental filmmakers from east berlin and one of the filmmakers said something to the effect of “rent in east berlin was 20 mark, gas and electricity were no more than 10 mark, we had nothing but time back then”.
If you made films at the DEFA, the east german state-owned film studio, as a director you were fully-employed all year through and had to produce maybe two films a year. These people lived in the literal “Schlaraffenland” and didn’t even fucking know it.
Any chance you remember the name of the documentary/ know where to find a copy? I bet my study group would love that.
It’s called “Die Subversive Kamera” (The subversive camera) from 1996 by Cornelia Klauß. It’s only in german and I don’t think there are any subtitles available anywhere, but I could still send you the file if you still want it.
Yes, please. That would be awesome. I did find this The Subversive Camera @ DEFA Film Library which indicates there are subs out there. The whole DVD it’s on sounds interesting, but I don’t have the spare cash and I can’t remember the last time I had a DVD drive to rip it with.
“We never worried about not having a place to live or a job, or about being evicted. There were no worries or fears about our livelihoods and there was so much in the way of culture and recreation that was available most of the time at little or no cost.”
She said that “attempts were always made not only that you had a job but that it was the best job you could do and whenever possible a job you really liked.”
Wtf I am pining for a life I never got to live. Let alone what the East Germans lost. It’s such a tragedy, what the capitalists have done to the world. Proves that all capitalism has to offer at this point is technology/technocracy to compensate for our material and cultural deprivation. Everything I’ve read or heard about ordinary life in the GDR, USSR, Yugoslavia, etc points to the fact that the communist countries have consistently been the most advanced in terms of social technology. I guess we’ve got phones and flatscreen TVs that we can hardly afford? F
