Anti-fascists, those who actively combated the nazis, were quite literally punished. I never knew, for example, that West Germany reduced pensions for holocaust survivors following "unification" (it was an Eroberung in German terms), or the fact that West Germany more harshly punished GDR functionaries or people who were affiliated with the party than they did nazis and nazi sympathizers. The last section of the book, which deals with the Treuhandanstalt and the assault on the dignity of former GDR citizens is perhaps the most moving. Far from being monolithic, it is a complete absurdity to tell the history of this country solely from the POV of the "resistance" since its founding. While the book might have emphasized the good aspects of the GDR, it does a really good job of contextualizing the slander against the socialist state when it comes to the Stasi (only 2 percent of GDR citizens were involved in it - hello NSA), the restrictions on the bourgeois notion of "freedom" (you can elect a bourgeois party every few years in West Germany!!), and also the alleged lack of access to information (GDR citizens had a radio station that played western music all day on Saturdays, for example, which was called DT64). The most emphatic refutation of decades of western/capitalist propaganda against the German Democratic Republic I have read. While unification brought East Germans access to a more affluent society, freedom to travel throughout the world and the end to an over-centralised political system, it also brought with it unemployment, social breakdown and loss of hope, particularly in the once thriving rural areas. There is also a whole new section on what happened in the aftermath of unification, particularly to the economy. The authors have added more detail on how the GDR came into being as a separate state, and about how society functioned and what values determined the every-day life of its citizens. This volume is an updated and much expanded edition of their booklet first published in 2009. The authors, while not ignoring the real deficiencies of GDR society, emphasise the many aspects that were positive, and demonstrate that alternative ways of organising society are possible. This book is an attempt to provide a more balanced evaluation and to examine GDR-style socialism in terms of what we can learn from it. Such descriptions are based largely on prejudice, ignorance and wilful animosity. Much has been written about how awful the German Democratic Republic supposedly was: a people imprisoned by a wall and subjugated by an omnipresent Stasi security apparatus.
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