A single watchtower is all that remains of the feared border that once separated East Germany from West Germany on the banks of the river Elbe near the town of Lenzen.
In the bad old days, three decades ago, there was a line of towers stretching all along the river, connected by fences topped with razor wire and patrolled by armed guards with dogs. Those who dared to flee the communist East by swimming across the treacherous river would be shot on sight. In 1963, a young man attempting the crossing drowned in this spot, one of hundreds who died trying to escape the German Democratic Republic.
Today, the watchtower offers a poignant reminder of the harsh repression inflicted by the East German regime on its citizens — and a suitable backdrop for Christian Hirte on his latest summer tour of the region. The government’s commissioner for eastern Germany has come to Lenzen to talk to locals who fled and later returned, and to visit a nearby museum documenting the history of the GDR. Above all, Mr Hirte has come to deliver a political message: despite the glum mood hanging over eastern Germany these days, reunification was a resounding success.
“Eastern Germany is today objectively in a better situation than it has ever been,” he insists, as he hurtles from one event to the next in a vintage East German Wartburg car. “We have to stop using this negative tone. We have every reason to look back on our achievements with pride.”
That sense of pride and achievement, however, is notably absent as Germans approach a series of crucial electoral tests in the east, as well as the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November. Instead, there is a growing feeling that the long process of convergence has not just stalled, but slipped into reverse. Today, Germans in east and west not only vote differently, think differently and feel differently — but those differences seem to be growing more pronounced.
The split echoes divisions that have appeared in countries around the world, including the UK and the US, where opposing social and political tribes glower at one another in mutual incomprehension. Fuelled by a familiar blend of economic disappointment, political alienation and historic grievance, the new east-west rift has nevertheless taken many Germans by surprise.
“After the collapse of East Germany, we thought that we would become more and more alike. Today we see that many of these differences have taken root,” says Steffen Mau, professor of sociology at Humboldt University in Berlin. “The east did not become like the west. Instead, we saw a build-up of frustration and disappointment in eastern Germany.”
Evidence of a widening gulf has become too copious to ignore. Last month, for example, a poll by the Allensbach Institute asked eastern Germans whether they saw democracy as practised in Germany as the best form of government. Only 31 per cent agreed. Two years ago, the figure was 53 per cent. In western Germany, meanwhile, 72 per cent described democracy as the best form of government, broadly unchanged from two decades ago.
The same divergence shows up when Germans in both parts of the country are asked about their identity: 47 per cent of eastern Germans say they identify above all as eastern Germans, compared with only 44 per cent who feel simply German. This, too, is a sharp reversal from only a few years ago. Also striking is the sheer persistence of specifically eastern German views and stereotypes: even 30 years after the fall of the wall (and with an east German chancellor, Angela Merkel, holding office since 2005), more than a third of eastern Germans describe themselves as “second-class citizens”.
The political gulf between east and west will be on dramatic display this Sunday, when the eastern federal states of Saxony and Brandenburg hold regional elections. Polls suggest the far-right Alternative for Germany could emerge victorious in both ballots, a triumph for the xenophobic, anti-European party that would be unthinkable in the west. As Renate Köcher, director of the Allensbach Institute, says: “We see an increasing divergence in voting patterns between east and west.”
Another distinguishing feature in the east is the continued strength of the far-left Die Linke party, the successor of the former East German Communist party. In Saxony, the AfD and Die Linke are expected to garner about 40 per cent of the total vote — a rich reward for two parties that sit on opposite ends of the political spectrum but that both make a blunt appeal to eastern Germans’ grievances and sense of separate identity.
“In the 1990s there was a real sense of departure in eastern Germany. People thought: everything will be better now,” says Lars Hünich, one of the AfD’s candidates for the regional parliament in Brandenburg. “Thirty years later you realise that things have turned out differently. The people in the east feel abandoned.”
That feeling of abandonment is not easy to back up with hard numbers. In the years since reunification, the east has received hundreds of billions of euros from the west to fund reconstruction and development. Unemployment — once a blight affecting millions of easterners — has plunged to record lows. Economic growth is stronger than in the west while salaries and pensions, though still lower in the region, have risen strongly in recent years. Cities such as Dresden, Leipzig and Potsdam, whose buildings were crumbling to the point of collapse, have been painstakingly restored to their former glory. Environmental disaster zones such as the “chemical triangle” north of Leipzig were cleaned up.
That triumphal narrative, however, fails to account for the personal disappointment and bitterness experienced by millions of eastern Germans in the years after reunification. From one day to the next, much of their experience and achievement was regarded as worthless; millions fell into unemployment, or had to take on jobs that were far below their qualifications; hundreds of thousands were forced to leave their hometowns and find work in the prosperous west. Easterners found themselves thrust into a system whose rules they barely understood, and that many felt ill-equipped to master.
“You walk through cities in eastern Germany and everything looks great. We spent all this time painting our façades. But now we realise what is going on behind those façades,” says Frank Richter, a writer and activist in the Saxon city of Meissen. “The great hopes and illusions that people had, the idea that we would now live in paradise, those hopes were disappointed. Now people look back and they realise: my children are gone [to the west] and they won’t come back. My grandchildren have gone and they won’t come back.”
The exodus of more than 1.9m eastern Germans since 1989 is seen by many as a key reason for the malaise. Those who left were overwhelmingly young, ambitious and well-educated — precisely the kind of citizens the east needs today to strengthen the economic and democratic fibres of society. Among those who stayed put, a certain nostalgia has taken root, along with a deep anxiety about yet more upheaval and change.
“There is a great fear of loss here in eastern Germany,” says Petra Köpping, a Social Democrat leader in Saxony and the regional government’s integration minister. “Everything that people have here they built up with their own hands [after reunification]. They want to hold on to that. And when they hear that there will be more change — be it as a result of migration, globalisation or the digital revolution — they are afraid that they will lose everything all over again.”
That nagging fear, she argues, was activated in particular by the 2015-16 refugee crisis, when more than 1m mainly Muslim refugees from countries such as Syria and Iraq arrived in Germany. “People said to me: ‘You and your refugees! You should integrate us first!,” says Ms Köpping. Time and again, she was confronted with the accusation that the same state that had left eastern Germans to fend for themselves during the post-1990 collapse was lavishing benefits and support on refugees. “That was the way they saw things: there’s money for them but not for us,” she says.
Mathias Höhn, a member of parliament for Die Linke and the party’s spokesman on eastern German affairs, points to another source of frustration: the sudden retreat of the state and public services in a region where the state used to take care of everything. “What makes this situation so difficult is that the transformation process [after 1990] coincided with the dismantling of the state. Schools were closed, train lines were closed. Today, the hospital is far away and politicians are far away,” he says. “This has given people the feeling that they have little to expect from the state, and that they have been left alone.”
For much of the recent past, that sense of abandonment was picked up and amplified above all by Mr Höhn’s own party. Today, the same sentiment drives more and more voters in eastern Germany into the arms of the AfD. Though most of its leaders come from the west, it has managed to present itself as an authentic voice of the east, vowing to complete the East German revolution of 1989 by toppling the old liberal order of the federal republic.
That stance produces some glaring contradictions: the AfD draws frequent comparisons between the totalitarian nature of the GDR and present-day Germany, which it likes to portray as a dictatorship of political correctness. At the same time, the party taps into a powerful sense of nostalgia for a past that some AfD voters remember as more orderly, more equal and more homogenous than the chaotic present.
“In the GDR everyone was the same. You stood together,” says Frank Schröter, an AfD voter attending a recent election rally in Brandenburg. “Some things have improved since reunification but many of us have come to realise that not everything that glitters is gold.”
Borrowing a term from clinical psychology, Mr Richter argues that eastern Germany suffers from a collective outbreak of “embitterment disorder” — a delayed response to the shocks and humiliations suffered in the post-unification years, when impossibly high hopes were crushed by the post-unification economic downturn.
“Every human being has to have some basic assumptions, for example that his work is worth something, that promises are kept and that there is at least some degree of justice in life,” he says. “When those basic assumptions are shattered, and there is no way to resist, then you get those embitterment syndromes. And those in turn can lead to aggression or depression.”
Until recently, most western Germans felt little need to understand — let alone address — the unease and anger festering in the east. Reunification was seen as a historical event, a chapter successfully closed. Indeed, some believe that attitude is still pervasive today. “The people in western Germany don’t understand the problems of eastern Germany,” says Ms Köpping. “When you ask people in the west what changed for them after reunification, they answer: nothing. When you ask people in the east, they say: everything.”
Yet others sense that the ignorance and lack of interest are at last starting to change. The success of the AfD has led westerners to look at the east with dismay and exasperation — but also with a renewed sense of curiosity and concern. That may be cause for optimism as Germans on both sides of the old-new divide look back. “The west thought for the longest time that the problems of eastern Germany were a problem only for eastern Germany,” says Mr Richter. “Now the west has realised: the problems of the east are the problems for all of Germany.”
East feels ‘humiliation’ over lack of elite roles
German reunification meant the end of an East German elite that had kept tight control over the country’s government, administration, military, industry, legal system and academia. Virtually overnight, all but a handful of those leadership positions were taken over by westerners, who flocked to the east in their thousands in the years after 1990.
As happy as many eastern Germans were to see the old guard go, the arrival of a new set of bosses from the west aroused mixed emotions. The real problem, however, was that they never left. According to a recent study by the University of Leipzig, only one in five leadership positions in eastern Germany today is held by easterners. In regional ministries and in the media, the number of eastern Germans has in fact declined over time.
Looking at Germany as a whole, the region is even more under-represented: a study from 2017 found that eastern Germans held just 1.7 per cent of top jobs in politics, the federal courts, the military and business, even though the east accounted for 17 per cent of the population.
“For eastern Germans, this whole leadership structure comes across as a humiliation,” says Petra Köpping, a Social Democrat leader from Saxony. “They say: ‘evidently people in the west don’t think we are capable of being in charge.’”
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