Weariness with Politics (October 2, 2006) For the author of this article, the chief problem of the new German division is not the division between East and West, but the differences between regions within the new Länder. West Germany, argues Munich journalist Heribert Prantl, was lucky that democracy and the “economic miracle” occurred simultaneously. In parts of the former GDR, he notes, the opposite was true, and an underclass emerged that was receptive to radical right-wing ideas.
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page 1 of 2 The New German Division When the division of Germany ended 16 years ago, it began anew. The new division does not run between East and West but rather between East and East. The region that acceded became a divided land. Today, there are two “Easts” in Germany: the “Upswing East” and the “Decline East.” The asymmetry in the East surpasses every kind of asymmetry known in the old Federal Republic. The East is blooming and the East is withering. It is blooming here and there, and it is withering on a large scale. It is blooming in Silicon Saxony, in Jena and Leipzig; it is withering in Anklam and in the Uckermark. Sad Reality The state assistance policy has written off the weak regions; the principle that the weakest need the most support no longer holds. The federal minister in charge speaks of “beacons” that must be promoted to make them shine even more brightly. They are illuminating a sad reality, the German irredenta. The West has shoveled trillions of Euro into the East. In return, the East is giving the West the best that it has: its young people. With the money that flows into the East every year, one could allocate 550 Euro per month to every East German. But the money is not being received in a way that would keep the young people. Dismantling the East The well-educated and motivated young people are going to the West, young women in even greater numbers than young men; the old and the unemployed are staying behind. This has enormously negative repercussions on the social structure; the life of civil society is withering. When hope is gone, hopelessness is what’s left. In large areas, the reconstruction of the East has become the dismantling of the East: apartment blocks are torn down, schools are closed. Of course those things also happen in the West, but not on such an extensive scale. It takes a lot of optimism to conceive of this dismantling as an opportunity and to regard the concepts behind it as an expression of the East German avant-garde, as East German politicians occasionally do. The Uckermark is as large as the Saarland but less densely populated than Burkina Faso. When the nearest doctor is sixty kilometers away and real unemployment is at fifty percent, one would rather not be part of this avant-garde. In many rural areas in the East the intelligent, young generation is missing; the young people who have stayed form the base of the NPD in many places. Back then, in 1989, when everything began, the young also set out for the West, leaving the GDR via Hungary in droves. Suddenly, parents didn’t care anymore; they risked everything and took to the streets. Thus, the German revolution came into being. Over the past sixteen years, this revolutionary potential has been ground down by the machinery of the market economy.
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