When Germany was divided between east and west during the Cold War, how did it affect national identity? Specifically, did Germans in the two countries view themselves as a common people divided or more like two different societies? What did the average German refer to their country and countrypeople as, and what did they call the other side? And did they have common tastes in media/sport, or were the two socities too divided for this to happen?
People in both parts of Germany considered themselves to be Germans, and they considered Germany to be a single nation dwelling in a single country divided for political reasons into two states. The denizens of each state were referred to as “Wessis” and “Ossis”; these were informal terms. (Formally it was “citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany” and “citizen of the German Democratic Republic”.)
As for tastes in media and sport, there were of course separate media outlets in the East and the West, and only people living close to the border could choose between, e.g., Eastern and Western television stations. As far as sporting tastes go, soccer was equally popular on both sides, but people tend to support local teams, so Wessis generally supported a western team, and Ossis an eastern team. There were of course separate leagues in the two countries, so Western and Eastern teams rarely played each other. The same would be true for other major sports. East and West Germany fielded separate Olympic teams.
Germany already had marked regional identities, and there are plenty of jokes about, e.g. Bavarian characteristics versus Prussian or Saxon. With Bavaria in the West and Prussia and Saxony in the East, these could be presented as Wessi-Ossi jokes, especially if they had a political overtone, but for the most part they were the same jokes that had been told before 1945 and that continue to be told today.
Side note: To this day, West Germany still looks down on East Germany because lots of money flows from the West to the East (Berlin). So they are still divided in a way.
I think that’s a gross generalization, and while it’s certainly true for some let’s not lump all “West” Germans together as one monolithic group.
It’s the general consensus but yeah, obviously not 100% of the population have the same ideas.
I was stationed in Germany when the Wall fell and I will say that a lot of Germans I knew were not happy because they were going to pay for it. IIRC the already high gas tax was bumped up by quite a bit and it pissed off my German girlfriend. There was also little patience for the Traubies clogging up the autobahn.
At the time there was a lot of talk about what an ecological disaster East German industry made of the country and about how much money the West would have to pay to clean it up. I’m not sure how that played out.
For broadcast media like television and radio, you’re greatly overstating the problem. There were only two small areas of East Germany, known jokingly as the Tal der Ahnungslosen, or “Valley of the Clueless”, that were unable to receive West German TV broadcasts. Most East Germans could and did watch West German TV. A good deal of West Germans could also watch East German TV, but they generally didn’t.
They didn’t always. In the Winter and Summer Olympics of 1956, 1960, and 1964, the two Germanies fielded a unified team.
They were furious when the Euro debuted, at least that was the impression I got. Everybody left the nominal prices the same e.g. when a bier cost .75 DM it was now .75 euro, a hefty increase.
Trabbies were horrid. The body was made of compressed wool and cardboard, the engine a 3 cylinder two-cycle. Yes, oil and gas mixed together. To add insult to injury there was a waiting list, usually 15 to 20 years. The joys of collectivism. Pay attention.
There was a considerable element in each country of being proud of NOT being the other, with both East and West claiming to be the true heirs of whatever they considered good in German history and culture. Some of that must have affected public sentiment and attitudes; and each side had its own homegrown theatre, film, music and so on (and, in the East, not just officially-approved ones).
There was a fair-sized number of people in East Germany who were content without necessarily approving of everything the government did, and despite not having the same access to consumer goods as the west. To this day there are not a few who miss many aspects of DDR daily life (even if some of them were reflections of its problems, such as the sense of community engendered by the barter economy of reciprocal favours between friends and neighbours) - not to mention the people who felt they had lost out twice over, by not being sufficiently conforming in the DDR and then not being as flexible and adaptable to the new circumstances as experienced careerists who managed to switch allegiances and smoothly insert themselves into good jobs in the united Germany.
Humanity is collectivist to the core. We are a social animal. Individualism is a euphemism for oppression of the many to suit the privileged few.
Socialism need not look like East Germany and its Trabbies.
On a somewhat related note, North Koreans and South Koreans use two different words for Korea. In North Korea, the country is called Chosun and in South Korea it’s called Hanguk.
Making, marketing and selling any sort of car seems the most collectivist thing ever.
Apart from it being a mass market concept, very very few individuals could create their own single one-off vehicle to run on the common roads.
Hear, hear.
I worked with a Berlin-based German supplier during the late 90s. The president took me to a show put on by a former East German group, and he was clearly embarrassed by its nature. He apparently was expecting something more sophisticated. At the end the trope played a number from the former regime and about 80% of the audience joined in a rousing chorus while 20% studied their shoes.
In Japan, I had some friends from the former East Germany and they had their complaints about their compatriots.
As bad as the reunification of Germany was, one with the Koreas would be infinitely worse. The former East Germany was the best of the East Block, not the basket case which defines NK’s economy.
One complaint I have heard from many erstwhile East Germans is that large state enterprises were sold at pennies to the dollar to West German “investors” who then simply dismantled them, not wanting competition. Who then claimed that the East was “backward”. The little I have read suggests that this is not without total merit.
I read one analysis which states that the worried are overstated since unlike East Germany, North Korea is adjacent to the planets biggest industrial power and market.
And has a labour force that might be assumed to be, shall we say, undemanding by comparison with almost anywhere else.
AK84, this is a good survey of the state of eastern Germany from a Polish scholar, where they talk about economic performance, trends in public opinion, etc… Economic performance is detailed in Chart 7 as well as in the text. In essence the economy of eastern Germany contracted a full 20% in 1990-1991 as they enacted free market reforms, then grew quite quickly relative to the west for about five years, and since the mid-1990s has been gaining on the west very slowly. That suggests that your East German acquaintances’ complaints have a lot of merit to them: a 20% GDP decline over the course of a year or two is really, really bad.
It’s actually interesting though that former East Germans today tend to be happier with their lives (and with the progress of their country since 1990) than residents of many other former communist societies. The public opinion surveys detailed in the article are really interesting and underscore the extent to which eastern and western Germans are really, really culturally different and have different worldviews, values etc… If that’s the case still today, 27 years after reunification, it was presumably even more so during the Cold War.
Anyway I disagree with you and think the integration of the two Koreas will be more difficult than the two Germanies, just because the differences between the two countries are much bigger. South Korea’s GDP per capita is 29 times higher than the north, whereas West Germany’s GDP per capita was only 1.8 times higher than East Germany’s. Plus East Germany, while an authoritarian one-party state, didn’t brutalize its population to nearly the same degree as North Korea.
The first difference between East Germany and North Korea is that when the GDR collapsed it also saw the collapse of its Superpower protector, the North Koreans Superpower protector is a lot less likely to collapse right now.
Secondly, the USSR was always extractive towards its satellites, the Chinese are putting in a lot more money into their neighbors. The epitome of this is the One Belt One Road initiative. The Chinese and South Koreans are already making feasibility studies as to pan Korean roads and rail links.
Thirdly, the Chinese are already invested in North Korea, a fact which most Western “experts” ignore or are ignorant of. The North Korean textile industry is heavily invested by the Chiese and the Chinese also buy significant quantities of Raw materials from North Korea and are beginning to get into their light engineering industry.
So, no way comparable to the East-West Germany situation.
The Soviets were extractive towards the Warsaw Pact countries, not necessarily their other satellites. (They spend a lot of money on Cuba, for example, buying their sugar at above-market prices). But I seem to recall that they were generally fairly hands-off towards East Germany (at least after the early 1950s), because they wanted the GDR to be a sort of showcase to demonstrate the potential of communism. In the 1945-1950 period they were of course extremely extractive and stripped the East Germany economy of a lot of industrial infrastructure.
I don’t argue with any of the rest of what you say, but there would have to be a lot of Chinese investment to overcome North korea’s disadvantages, since we are talking about a thirty fold difference in GDP/capita.