One of the dirtiest places in the world: workers’ settlement in front of the site of the lignite combine in Bitterfeld in winter 1989.
Image: Paul Glaser
The emergence of the “Gemeinschaftswerk Aufschwing Ost” was a learning process. Politicians and entrepreneurs had to develop new strategies for economic development in East Germany. A guest post.
With increasing distance to October 3, 1990, the balance of German unity is becoming more and more critical in a large part of the public. The monita that were presented include the continuing prosperity and wage gap between West and East Germany, the comparatively low pensions, but also the lack of representation of East Germans in the functional elite.
While the Federal Republic was viewed by a majority of East Germans in 1990 as part of the solution to many problems, thirty years later a narrative has prevailed that the West has created more problems than it has solved. The Leipzig literary scholar Dirk Oschmann drives this criticism in a polemic entitled Der Osten; a West German invention” now takes it to the extreme by accusing the West of being responsible for “the ostracism and radical political, economic and social disadvantages of the East that have existed for more than 30 years”.