Putting the word Democratic in your country’s title is a bit like describing yourself as crazy. You are not.

So it was that the German states of Mecklenburg, Brandenburg, Thuringia, and Saxony were not, shall we say, popular holiday destinations between 1945 and 1989.

They were, along with East Berlin, the constituent parts of the very totalitarian and not at all democratic Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or DDR. Known to you and me as East Germany.

Were, that is, until a dark night in November 1989 when the slow thaw at the core of communism reached a torrent and, to the sound of pocket radios playing David Hasslehoff and Pink Floyd, Europe took sledge hammers to a wall in Berlin and embraced for the first time since the 1930s.

In the space of a year the “me thinks you doth protest too much” German Democratic Republic ceased to exist. Germany, without a misnomer in sight, fused into a single country and it became acceptable for people the world over to plan luxurious family breaks by the Elbe without fear of secret police intervention or long queues for post cards.

Nearly twenty years on what impact has that transition had? After the deluge of capitalism upon the East what is the legacy, what did the West change, what remains?

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For years the east of Germany had been grey. The country famously had “the most successful economy of any of the Warsaw Pact countries.” That is like saying it was the fastest snail to ever draw breath.

The 16 million residents of the country were cold, they were poor, they lived in constant fear of World War taking place above their heads and they were spied upon.

The Stasi was the most successful thing about the Old East. Technically named the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security), the organisation triumphantly named itself, with good reason, the gmost effective state security force in the worldh.

By the time East Germany collapsed, the Stasi had 91,000 employees and 300,000 informants. People lived in terror of speaking their minds in front of their children for what they would say at school.

Here in the West it is difficult to imagine what that must feel like – to be constantly watched by the all-powerful state, to eye neighbours, friends, family, partners with genuine suspicion.

One clue to how it felt comes from the fact, retold in the 2006 film The Lives of Others – Das Leben der Anderen (set in East Berlin in the 1980s), that towards the end, the statistics mad DDR state just plain stopped counting suicides among its own people.

The DDR liked very little more than to count things about the population and yet it could no longer keep up with the appalling rate of death.

When a people are so subjected, so unhappy, they look for salvation. People willing to kill themselves are also willing to believe incredible things of people they identify as their saviours.

In the DDR they did not have far to look.

Part of the West’s strategy to win over the east was to appeal to the baser instincts of people. “Join us – have these things” has worked for conquerors for centuries. After the war it was at the core of the capitalist offensive.

When VP Richard Nixon traveled to Moscow in 1959 for talks he chose to show off, among other Western things, an electric lemon squeezer.

He knew that when you had to wait five years for a plastic car named a Trabant that would make a better plant pot than mode of transport it was easy to become entranced by a lemon squeezer.

Every day the austere, drab, poor, persecuted, paranoid Osties of the DDR were bombarded, surreptitiously, with reminders of another way of doing things.

Western radio and television signals blasted at full power across the DDR. (The only city they could not reach was the geographically secluded Dresden – still known to this day because of its inability to pick up western radio signals as the “valley of the stupid”.)

By the 1980s no amount of totalitarianism could suppress the fact that the East was well and truly in love with the West. The population was suicidal and possibly delusional about what the West could offer. They loved the wealth, the freedom, the clothes, the music (or at least David Hasselhoff) and the opportunity that came with all of that. They listened to the radio, to the propaganda and built their expectations higher and higher until something had to give.

Incidentally curly-haired “actor” David Hasselhoff has stated, somewhat incredibly, that he is unhappy that there is no official recognition of his role as the man who “reunified Germany.”

He was popular on both sides of the Berlin wall in the late 1980s, that much is true; however the man made famous by Knightrider and Baywatch did not end the Cold War — no matter what he claims.

He is however perhaps significant if only to offer an insight into the Osties (ost is German for east) mindset; the state of sheer despair the east Germans must have faced if the sight of a leather jacket clad Hasselhoff was seen as alluring.

*

That was all part of the great lie of the German unification: the lie that has sculpted the fate of the East of Germany for the past 19 years. The lie that was spoken by no one but imagined by a hopeful nation. They saw electric lemon squeezers, credit cards and, poor souls, David Hasselhoff and thought it exciting, they convinced themselves the future of unification was bright, the future lay in the West. They thought they would enter a meritocracy and be successful, that they would never, they lied to themselves, look back.

They were wrong.

*

If Berlin is the place where unification became real, Leipzig, that ancient university city where Goethe studied and Napoleon was first defeated, is where the idea formed. It was among the many students of the city that the protests of 1989 first started to gather pace. Today the baroque city, all high towers and broad parks, today looks like much of Europe. You can buy Mcdonalds. You can whistle the Star Spangled Banner. You can live in your home and make curious cooing noises while someone points out the holes where Stasi documents used to be hidden. You can read what you want, vote how you want and work how you want. Capitalism is, it would seem, everywhere. So, walking along the street, where here can we find the remains of communism? This city, the rest of the DDR was under the hammer and sickle for nearly fifty years. Surely there is a trace?

The problem is that capitalism has a far richer culture than communism. It is fat where the commies are thin. It gets in the way. This is compounded by the fact the former communist states donft want to remember.

In Prague the Communist museum is somewhat laughably installed in a back room upstairs from a McDonald’s. In the old DDR they havenft even bothered with ironies like this.

But the detritus after the deluge is there, the relics, the scars of communism are there. You just have to take the tram.

*

Leipzig, like many European cities, has a tram system. Under the DDR this was maintained, like all the tram systems of the DDR, in a somewhat rustic fashion. No surprise therefore that with the demise of the Berlin Wall and the decision to abandon communism, many cities invested some of their Unity Bonus (a wonderful euphemism for tax levied on the west of Germany after a promise for “no new taxes) in sparkling new carriages.

Following 1990, however, Leipzig was not easily phased by the wash of easy Western money which splashed from the Elbe to the Dneiper.

Leipzig held onto its old trams, spent a little money here, a little money there and managed expectation.

In nearby Halle, to the northwest, the burghers took the money and ran, full pelt, to the corporations of the West — Siemens and the like — to kit themselves out with the very latest in tram technology.

Ten years on, Halle is poor. It has not survived the transition to capitalism well. Leipzig, on the other hand, with its clunky, slightly smelly trams, is comparatively wealthy.

My contact in Leipzig, an old university friend, Marc Schneider, told me the two facts are not treated as coincidence, and that the tram an East German city now has is almost jokingly seen as inversely proportional to its success.

“When the cities replaced the trams and worked on the houses it raised expectations,” he said. “People desired so much from the change and that‘swhen it didn‘t work. People could live in the old conditions. They had to move out of them slowly.”

The crucial difference between the two is the management of expectation. And where expectation, stoked by new infrastructure and unrealistic promises, was allowed to flourish, it has been met by the disappointment of reality and as a consequence a new and bizarre sentimentality has grown up.

In Germany they call it Ostalgia: the fairly obviously a portmanteau of Ost and nostalgia, a desire to live in the simpler, more straightforward, more structured past.

Ostalgia comes in two distinct forms.

One is a nostalgia and interest of the predominantly wealthy based on aesthetics and a rather patronising appreciation of kitsch. Artists such as Ricarda Roggan have perpetuated this interest by the romantic appreciation of the objects of the DDR – the material culture of cultural poverty.

But while this Ostalgia is a whimsy, the other is a very sad reaction by many of those from the DDR who feel as though the promises made to them in 1989 have been reneged upon – who believed the dream and woke up to find the same problems under a different flag.

In many ways these issues have been exacerbated by the demographic shift of the unification. When the wall came down those with get up and go got up and went.

Those who were left were high on hopes and low on achievement. After the initial surge of optimism in the early 1990s and slight wage increases which were more than off set by rises in the cost of living, there has come a crushing realisation that the West is not all that it was built up to be. David Hasselhoff comes with a hangover, or in the absence of structured communism all that remains is the people.

Now, as in so many of the former Eastern Bloc nations, there is a resurgent socialist political agenda and a desire for the good old days. Political Party Die Linke (The Left) has seen votes recently grow in the East by suggesting capitalism has failed.

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Where else has there been a sudden liberation, a sudden movement of a people from an oppressive regime to a meritocracy? Where else can we find clues as to what is going on here?

Following the American War of Independence, the people of the 13 colonies threw off the shackles of an intransigent but familiar society and found, much like the East Germans, the opportunity before them to make their way in a meritocracy.

One of the first observers of the affects of this in America was the French lawyer and historian Alexis de Tocqueville who toured the newly independent republic to observe the behaviours of the revolutionaries.

His passages described what he observed as the psychological implications of liberty on those who had never known it.

In a chapter of Democracy in America (1835) entitled “Why the Americans are Often so Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity” he outlined his belief in the connection between dissatisfaction and high expectation and he charted the magical appearance, like a green-eyed familiar of liberty, of envy.

He wrote: “When royal power supported by aristocracies governed nations, society, despite all its wretchedness, enjoyed several types of happiness which are difficult to appreciate today. Having never conceived the possibility of a social state other than the one they knew, and never expecting to become equal to their leaders, the people did not question their rights. They felt neither repugnance nor degradation in submitting themselves to severities, which seemed to them like inevitable ills sent by God. The serf considered his inferiority as an affect of the immutable order of nature. Consequently, a sort of goodwill was established between classes so differently favoured by fortune. One found inequality in society, but men’s souls were not degraded thereby.”

In the years after liberty, Americans, just as the East Germans, rapidly had to accept the notion that their success or failure was no longer the consequence of the state, of fate, but of their own achievement. Their status was a judgement of them.

Free societies and communist ones both have lower classes – but after 1990 the insulation to failure offered by totalitarianism to the Germans’ egos was removed. They were laid bare as successes or failures.

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After the deluge of capitalism the chains of the DDR were washed away. Some rushed with foolhardy vigour to their new trams and disappointed.

Only by slow depressurisation could the transition succeed.

Copyright Last Exit 2008